One thing that the losers have in common is that their execution was not good enough (or outright bad in the case of ExpertsExchange).
But Altavista was huge when Google started. AOL had network effects that did not help them, so it is absolutely not clear that it is impossible.
People however are more lethargic and programmed by their mobile devices these days, so it may be more difficult now.
Google had the entire internet inedexed and was running their engine from Standford with just a few machines.
The internet was tiny back in 1997.
In 1997 there was 1 million web sites.
Today there are 2 billion.
[1] https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
One thing that the losers have in common is that their execution was not good enough (or outright bad in the case of ExpertsExchange).
But Altavista was huge when Google started. AOL had network effects that did not help them, so it is absolutely not clear that it is impossible.
People however are more lethargic and programmed by their mobile devices these days, so it may be more difficult now.