I'm quibbling, but I worked at Google between 2004 and 2009, and Google's quality metrics showed that while Bing and Yahoo (the two biggest competitors) were definitely behind Google, they weren't ever very far behind Google.

So it's my belief that both of them, then, were better than Google, now.

Having a growing userbase is clearly the ultimate metric of whether your project is going to be viable, and yet if your project isn't offering something that is "better" in some way and you don't have the weight of a billion dollar company behind you to push things, you won't succeed.

I fairly recently separated from an "AI" company that focused on userbase acquisition over things like roadmaps, vision, or engineering, with the result that they got neither userbase nor engineering.

The time when management revealed in a video meeting that they expected the engineers to, essentially, spam the Internet to push this partly-completely and very unclear project and we the engineers literally covered our mouths and said nothing is one of the more surrealistic events of my professional life!