Google changed everything but nowadays it feels as bad as Yahoo was at the time. Google search is now optimised for ad $$$, not for finding what you're looking for. If Google hadn't existed then maybe we would have got competitiveness in the search space.
>>zarzav+(OP)
It would have been another hegemony. Yahoo was google then. AskJeeves, AltaVista and many others were not ever going to be competition. Yahoo was the stronger one then and it failed.
Who do you think it would have been competitive for?