good point. uber and online dating both lacked the network to be superior initially. it's hard to say what industry search engines disrupted... (libraries, yellow pages, encyclopedias, travel agents?) but in 1998 when google was founded, they indexed 26 million pages.
Regarding the statement Google was always superior to yahoo... it would be nice to have a timeframe, because Google provided Yahoo's results as late as 2004.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.h...
Here is the original google: http://www.topdesignmag.com/how-did-the-original-google-serv...
Regarding the statement Google was always superior to yahoo... it would be nice to have a timeframe, because Google provided Yahoo's results as late as 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
My point is that the author is a mainstream adopter and is comparing the mainstream products to their counterparts that they disrupted.