Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.
Did you sleep through the search engine wars? Not a single search engine was good. There were sites dedicated to sending your search to all of the search engines at once.
Google showed up and it was game over. Their ad sales took off, and then they came out with gmail with 1gb of free storage and everyone went nuts for it since trying to stay under 15mb for your local isp was a pain in the ass.
Google disrupted very hard and continued to do so in many ways for a long time.
Brave search has been a good alternatielve so far which does not rely on other search engines to get results.
During the 2000s at least, Google was king and very few people did not see much harm in Google running the search engine market.
