I was developing with ESRI ArcGIS at the time, ESRI was a multi-billion dollar GEO company who had no product that even came close to the instant utility Google Maps launched with.
The only other product that had a similar "Wow" factor around the same time was Keyhole which we were using before Google acquired them and used it to launch "Google Earth".
If anything Google Maps spawned competition in the last decade, the existing competitors like ESRI are still developing their GEO products for Internal/Enterprise use, but now there are a number of competing consumer mapping services that provide the same utility and functionality of Google Maps from large technology companies that didn't have GEO as part of their competency like: Apple Maps, Bing Maps and Tencent Maps.
There were multiple competing products when Google Maps was released, so they had competition. Google's product was simply better at than most alternatives at the time.
Feel free to believe Google Maps had competition (they didn't), nothing else at the time provided the same instant utility of Google Maps which basically ushered in the new category of "real-time search-based Consumer Maps" of which there are plenty now.
Anything that existed previously would've needed a rewrite to achieve the same instant utility of Google Maps. Nothing without it could've become mainstream. The competition like ESRI still doesn't have it, but they're still focused on Internal/Enterprise Usage, they let you build GEO Maps but they don't let you build consumer maps that compete with Google Maps.
You're agreeing with me here by admitting that there was existing competition. The rest of your remarks are about how much better Google's offering was to the competition, which is a point I've already agreed with.
There were existing GEO companies that provided Mapping Services (I was developing GEO Apps with one of them at the time), but there was nothing like the consumer focused Google's Maps preceding it, with its worldwide pre-rendered imagery at multiple zoom-levels coupled with a global search that displayed annotated Markup results delivered over an Ajax Web interface that allowed seamless panning/zooming of the Earth scaled to millions of users.
It wasn't a fluke that Google Maps gained instant popularity with mainstream Internet users over everything else, there was nothing else like it.
If by "DB search" you mean the old-school engines like Lycos, etc., then yes, it is like saying that. And yes, I think those did count as existing competition for Google search.
I suspect that we mean different things by "competition" here...
Mapquest back then had the clunky “click the big arrow” to move the map and reload the page navigation...
Was a real eye-opener of "so that's how you make Maps fast" at the time, just pre-render the entire world at multiple static zoom levels. Which wasn't an option (disk cost) for anyone developing their own in-house mapping Services at the time. For my next GEO project I did the next best thing and used their Google Maps API to change it to make map tile requests to our ArcGIS App which dynamically cached map tiles on the fly, so whilst it didn't pre-render all tiles, it provided a nice "Google Maps"-like UX for popular areas of our region.
And then the data wasn't there for years and years also. And Google has lots more POI data in much of the world.
(I say this as a contributor to OSM...)