I'd argue that Google was able to win specifically because they had so much competition. They weren't fighting against one or two massive entrenched competitors in an established space. Search was still pretty new at that point and Google's approach to it was innovative.
Google also had lots of space to improve on its competition when it came to metrics like latency, which paid off. Nobody really has the option to beat them on latency now. That's not really Unfair in any fashion but it is an example of how it would be much harder to dethrone the ruling search engine in 2020.
> People didn't pick Google because it was hard to switch, they converged on Google because the product was that good
That's not how I remember things from that time. I started to use Google, because it was faster than dogpile and the other oddly named search engines.
It wasn't a quality reason. There was the expectation that a search for information would take longer than a single click, so a little digging wasn't an issue.
My experience was that the quality of the search results were much better.
The product was so good that people noticed. They were able to take this and leverage this into being search for a really large property, like
Back in the 90s there were lots of search engines. People didn't pick Google because it was hard to switch, they converged on Google because the product was that good - there was Infoseek, HotBot, AskJeeves, Alta Vista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite ... the list goes on.
It's a theoretical problem to have a significantly better search engine and not find users for it.