When google started search was a big business with a number of competitors. The most popular, Yahoo, was one of the biggest sites! There was even a meta-search engine (dogpile, I think?) that would run searches against several of the top contenders, but personally I mostly used AltaVista until google killed them.
Google did have a key product insight that you didn't need the "web portal" cruft -- just good search was enough.
What’s funny is that Google itself started out as a “demo that interested nerds could play with” — searching your own name on the internet was so squarely a nerd move in the late 90s.
Google’s disruption here does not lie in the “ChatGPT or LLMs wil kill Search” realm. Rather, the fact that there isn’t a small-scale, dozen users product leveraging LLMs coming from Google, oh idk maybe something like Quora or Google Answers, or maybe the “Google Flights experience with Assistant”