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.
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.
And GOOG is not a one trick poney any more, by far, especially when it comes to revenue.
Can't say the same of OpenAI
Same thing happen with Internet Explorer and Chrome, or going from Yahoo mail/Hotmail to Gmail.