Sometimes it helps to do a little research before trying to make a clever retort. Wikipedia has decent coverage of search engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines

Go.com, Lycos, AltaVista, Excite, Yahoo!, Dogpile, Ask.com, Yandex and many other search engines existed before Google entered. Most were wildly profitable.

Sometimes it helps to read the articles you link to. None of them show that "Most were wildly profitable." In fact, those articles mention that search engines before google struggled to make money.

Search engines had a lot of competition?