Search wasn't even a business when Google blossomed in the late 90s. Altavista was a halo product for Digital. Yahoo used it to drive traffic to its services th

Search wasn't even a business when Google blossomed in the late 90s. Altavista was a halo product for Digital. Yahoo used it to drive traffic to its services that made money. Etc. Etc. Etc. Every search engine then had a "Try this search on [Yahoo], [AltaVista], [Excite], [etc], [etc]" snippet at the bottom of each results page. GoTo changed everything with text ads and Google was the first company to turn search into big business. In other words, I agree with your larger point :)