Google Search wasn’t fundamentally different than Altavista, just marginally better. Had Yahoo! not bought Altavista, there’s a chance it might’ve stayed competitive with Google.
Sure, the homepage of Altavista was a relic of the 90s. The SERP however wasn’t as radically different. If a minimal homepage is enough to be “category defining” to you, we can just agree to disagree and move on.
There’s a reason we “Google it” and don’t “altavista it”. ISTR altavista’s pitch over yahoo was that they indexed the entire web, they just couldn’t return meaningful results. Google could.
We probably verbed google rather than other products, because of that consistency. But at least my kid's peer group seems to have taken to using 'search up' as their verb... Kind of like look up.