I think there are two factors that helped Google. First, the search engine landscape back then was absolutely abysmal. I'm sure someone will chime in saying that it's abysmal today as well, but the reality is that 99%+ of consumer searches get good results today. And that's simply because the nature of search has changed: we have billions of people using the internet, and they overwhelmingly just search for products to buy, local restaurants that offer takeout, or for familiar pop content to watch or listen to. And there's some SEO spam there, but also pretty fierce quality assurance by search engines.

Second, the internet was different: when all nerds declared that Google is good, that was CNN-grade newsworthy (and CNN used to matter a lot more back then), simply because the internet seemed kinda important, but there was no other authority on the topic. Today, that's not the case. If you need someone to opine on the internet on air, you invite some political pundit or a business analyst.

So no, I don't think you can repeat the success of Google the same way. It was a product of its time.

Google maps is probably a big moat that's very hard to replicate. You can't as easily just crawl all of that data. It's not easy to generate directions. The average user doesn't want to use your search engine for one thing and Google for everything else, they just want a one stop shop for search.