c3oc3o - 4:03 pm on Nov 14, 2002 (gmt 0)

The "Best of the Web" award for "Navigation Aides" in 1994 mentions: AliWeb, Internet Meta-Index, Jumpstation, W3Catalog, and WorldWideWebWorm.

Directory-turned-obscure-PPC-engine Galaxy has a long page on the history of web search:
[galaxy.com...]
.. in which the "World Wide Web Wanderer" is called the mother of all search engines.

The earliest ones mentioned that still exist in some form:

Excite (1993)
Galaxy (1994) directory
Yahoo (1994) directory
WebCrawler (1994) first full-text search
Lycos (1994)
Infoseek (1994)
Altavista (1995) first natural language queries, boolean operators, link search
Metacrawler (1995)
Inktomi/Hotbot (1996)

As to why: Just about all of them were university research projects.
Google came much later JOAT, 1998 I believe?