I'll call BS on that.

AltaVista was a great (I'd argue the best) search engine up until Google. More importantly, it wasn't a marketing stunt, it was the product of a research project and some really great, bright engineers.

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.[3] Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea,[4][5] along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who wrote the Web crawler and indexer, respectively. The name "AltaVista" was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto, California. AltaVista publicly launched as an Internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.[6][7]

At launch, the service had two innovations that put it ahead of other search engines available at the time: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many more webpages than were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient back-end search, running on advanced hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

I agree, it was quite good for the time.

I can justify considering it "marketing" though. They didn't consider it a way of making money, so from a business point of view it was basically a way of showing how good their research was and how powerful their hardware was. (Compare to, say, Deep Blue, or AlphaGo today.)

And to be fair, Google didn't start out knowing how they would make money either.

Yeah; I worked on a Norwegian Internet Index, which had its own search engine (our own crawler and all) back in the mid-late 90s, so I used search engines a lot back then.

Now, from my memory, AltaVista and HotBot? were the key go to players outside of Yahoo. Google was a tiny fringe player at first, until, well of course we all know how that went. So AltaVista was definitely a key player at a very significant time in Internet history.

Infoseek delivered far superior results to altavista in that era.

Ah, I had forgotten about them ... and more:

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2064954/where-are-th...

Which doesn't detract at all from the fact that there were a dozen major search players - including AltaVista - that Google bested to take over the market, courtesy of a radically superior product. None of that should have happened if the op premise were correct. The search market was more than saturated.

Turns out one of the many flaws in the op premise, is that you can invent a superior product, or provide a superior service, in an existing category and prosper accordingly. The iPod should have never existed otherwise, there were plenty of existing mp3 players.

It pertains to the traditional physical space as well as tech. Pizza companies as an example have been killing each other for a long time, new ones rise up routinely and displace weak competitors. If the op premise were correct, that'd be impossible. Pizza Hut & Domino's were founded a quarter century before Papa John's.