Not quite: manually assembled search directories like the old Yahoo! were already passé before Google came out. The increasing size of the Web and the arrival of AltaVista had already made automatically-indexed search engines an established thing. The problem was simply that the AltaVista results were overwhelmed with spam. Early on Google search results were very well-ranked, but quite narrow since the engine only crawled and indexed a relatively small proportion of the Web. AltaVista's coverage was much better, iirc, and Google's limited scope was often remarked on in places like Slashdot.