TL:DR – The final launch of Google was in 1997 after it was prototyped in 1995 (the year I launched my first website). It remains the dominant search engine to this day having pretty much seen off all of the competition at the time and pushed down any recent upstarts.
Back in the 1990s, long before Google existed as an official tool, there were several search engines that were my go-to search engines, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, a couple of others. Then along came Google proper in 1997 and changed everything. Everything. If you had a website, which I had done since 1995, you had to rank on Google or nobody would find you.
There was a point in time, when my website did indeed rank. It had a Google PageRank of 9 (out of 10). This ranking was on a par with the BBC and CNN for a time. I ranked on page one of the SERPs (search engine results pages) for almost every key phrase I could’ve wanted to be on page one for and was number one on those pages for a lot of key terms. I used to get a lot of traffic, a lot of unique visitors. But, as the web became increasingly crowded and Google tweaked its algorithms, my site slipped a bit, then a lot. Then along came social media and that changed everything again. Well, not quite everything.
Today, Google remains the dominant force in search. Check the stats, its market share is commonly reported as more than 90 percent. All of the other search engines take a slice of a lot less than 10 percent of the search pie between them. When I look at my site’s stats, visitors from search engines are mainly from google.com and then a load from the various national Googles. Bing gives me less than 2% of my page views, Baidu about 1.5%, and everything else, like Yandex, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, just 1% or less. Google delivers over 90%.
Fundamentally, Google has sustained its reputation for being a reliable and trustworthy search engine. It continually innovates and improves. Morever, it’s made so much money over the years it can continue to invest in itself and move forward where smaller companies might falter and fail. In addition, it has diversified successfully. Even while some of its projects have failed and been shuttered, there are important tools that almost everyone continues to use to this day.
I should point out that I use DuckDuckGo as my go-to search engine these days.