Well maybe not in 1999. Adwords didn't launch until 2000? Google's 1999 revenue was...... I forget, but it was incredibly small. Costs were also incredibly small too though, so this isn't a good analogy given the stated year of 1999.
Google in 1999 was already far superior to Yahoo and other competitors. I don't think OpenAI is in a similar position there. It seems debatable as to whether they're even the best, let alone a massive leap ahead of everyone else the way Google was.
Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember.
Yahoo was always more a directory of websites.
AltaVista was better than Lycos or Yahoo but then Google was faster, gave better results than AltaVista and the very minimal UI was something interesting. I quite liked AltaVista but I never went back to it after using Google either.
I might even say Gemini 3 is better than GPT5 than what Google was to AltaVista. GPT5 feels rather useless to me after my time now with Gemini.
As I remember it (I was just starting college at the time), Google search was an absolute revelation. You could type in a search term and the first hit would usually be what you wanted. AltaVista required a lot of looking through results to find the right thing and messing around with boolean operators. People switched over and never looked back. Google went from zero to a substantial majority market share in only about one year.
> Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I remember it being significantly better. Alta Vista, you'd have to dig into page 8 before getting to the good stuff. History is written by the victors, as they say, but I remember Google search results being significantly better than Altavista. It wouldn't be until two decades later that I got to work there though.