Immediately before Google were search engines like AltaVista https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista (1995) and Lycos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos (1994) which were not directories like Yahoo. Google won by not being cluttered with non-search web portal clutter, and by the effectiveness of PageRank, and because by the late 1990s the web was too big to be indexed by a manually curated directory.