Sort of. The average search results would have gotten a little better, but only because Excite/Altavista/etc would have poached some key early employees of Goog

Sort of. The average search results would have gotten a little better, but only because Excite/Altavista/etc would have poached some key early employees of Google and walked away with their algorithm, which was Googles key advantage back then. So the big incumbents would be able to use PageRank AND their pre-existing market share to destroy google easily. The huge leap forward in search (and it was a huge leap) would have never happened, because their would be no challengers who could match the purchasing power and market share of incumbents