I’m fuzzy on the timeline, but it was definitely THE search engine for a while. And I’d say the one that’s most memory-holed. I feel like Yahoo’s unlikely survival as some vestigial online service made people remember it and I guess Americans in particular had an Ask Jeeves moment at some point? For me it was Altavista until Google, for sure, and they were trading blows for a good while. I almost remember Gmail being the thing that tipped the scales more than the search quality.