Having used excite, Infoseek, Lycos, yahoo, askjeeves, Altavista, and even astalavista, my recollection is that they all (bar yahoo’s manually curated index) sucked for any high quality content. Then google came around, yahoo initially integrated them for non-catalogued content, and they took off, absolutely dominating the competition.

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.