No they weren’t yet, you still had Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Ask Jeeves and many others. Yahoo was probably the dominate one. Most households used AOL who just purchased MapQuest.
The dot com bubble killed the competition.
I remember my dad telling me about google and me telling him metacrawler.com FTW. This is the same guy who showed me the WWW on a lynx browser, and I scoffed that FTP was where it’s at.
That date is off, it was somewhere in the 2002-2004 range. Back in 1999 I think Yahoo! was the most popular, or maybe AOL’s search engine.