Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.
The reason it was better is that the other search engines used the programmer-entered data in a page’s title, meta tags, and headings to categorize the page’s content, whereas google also used the text of links pointing to that page to categorize the page.
Google crowdsourced categorization to content consumers, ie people acting in the same role as searcher.
In a way, it’s an excellent example of the concept of negotiated identity.