No.
The question is usually meant to extract from the presenter a concise explanation of what will make their product better than the current incumbent. If you can't articulate the value of your idea in 15 seconds or less, it needs more thought.
And while you don't have to be #1 or #2 to make money, few (if any) investors want to invest in a #3 or #7 offering. Also, you kinda DO need to be #1, or at least have every bit of belief and conviction that you will be #1 in some short order. Raising money to build a me-too is "dumb". And people still get sucked into the fallacy of "it's an $X Billion market, and if we can get just 3% of X we will win". You won't get 3%. You'll get 80%, or nothing (measured over a business life timeline, not a short-term sample).
Unless you were asking them for $1 billion this is pretty dumb.
I wouldn't say it's necessarily dumb. You fail if you're pitching a search engine and you don't have a compelling answer to "Why wouldn't people just use Google?"
But yeah, if he wanted to create a web search engine, then he was asked the right question.
>> ""Why wouldn't I just use [most popular competitor]"?"
Unless you were asking them for $1 billion this is pretty dumb. You don't need to be #1 or #2 to make money, and features change after going live.