People were not aware of the potential for search before Google. They thought the market for search was over-supplied with options. Evidence is in some 10-yea

People were not aware of the potential for search before Google. They thought the market for search was over-supplied with options. Evidence is in some 10-year-old Red Herrings that mention: Alta Vista, Lycos, Web Crawler, DogPile, mySimon, etc., etc.. I was hard-pressed to make Google find anything 10-years-old+ from the web. And advanced search was no apparent help. Perhaps fodder for a rival? Clayton Christiansen might say that out of the niche of a rival which undermines Google's business model rises the Google-killer, or at least -queller.