Linux was out in 1991 ... Google was a late comer in 1998 and which for many years other search engines, both in general and perhaps more in the field I did a lot of web searching, returned much better results. Google eventually began to perform much better returning a slightly more good results iirc around 2002 and then further improving results ... also as M$ and a few other players having specialist string search engines banned from the web, (if anyone recalls M$ being upset people could search for some of their code being leaked ... ) google was the next best alternative though incredibly limited to do the same.

Britannica is still in a relatively high regard, and I heard that Windows and iOS are not entirely marginal.

There may be room for more than one good LLM, especially in niche areas of knowledge.

Maybe, but that'll be B2B, just like how most of the niche 'competitors' to Wikipedia are now.