No, but at the time, the Internet was also about 1/100th of what it is today and Altavista was still worth about $3bn. It's hard to picture now, but back in 1999 Altavista and Yahoo were towering giants online.

AV was spawned by researchers from DEC in 1995 a full 3 years before Google came on the scene. I'd say Google was the severe underdog at the time.