Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment - Ars Technica

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In the mid-’90s, the web was exploding, but finding anything of actual value on it felt like an elaborate negotiation with whatever proto-search engine happened to be standing closest to the door. Unlike now, when Google is widely seen as both portal and gatekeeper, sites like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves promised to tame the chaos, each with its own suite of quirks, charms, and flaws.

The real story of pre-Google search is not that early engines were inferior. It’s that they reflected a different Internet entirely, one where directories mattered, crawling was still an art, ranking was fragile, and the idea of “search” had not yet hardened into a single dominant interface.

A different kind of web

The first thing to remember about the pre-Google Internet is that there was no built-in assumption that you could search for everything. Many users found pages through Yahoo-style directories, bookmarks, newsgroups, email signatures, and links from site to site because the web was still small enough that human organization could compete with machine indexing. It was an era of Wild West-style discoverability. Search engines existed, but they were only one part of a larger ecosystem that blended curation and accident.

Before those engines became the main public interface to the web, resources like Usenet were showing people how to organize and discover information online. Conceived in 1979, it gave users topic-based newsgroups and a culture of distributed discussion that made online information feel social and communal before the first major web engines arrived. Usenet helped establish the habit of navigating vast, messy digital spaces through categories and communities rather than a single search box.

Nicole M. Radziwill worked as a systems administrator, programmer, and project manager, among other things, in the ‘90s. She remembers Usenet as a portal to unearthing interesting content online. “It was the way to find out about websites that might interest you,” she said. “I got on Usenet in 1990 as a student in Durham, North Carolina… it was delightful, especially the alt.* and misc.* groups. People would put links in at the bottom of their posts, and awareness grew organically. And if you wanted safer or more reliable recommendations, you could limit yourself to moderated groups.”

It was an era when the term “discovery” carried actual weight, when you could authentically be one of the first people viewing a piece of content, regardless of its quality or how long it may have existed—an era of equal parts wonder and frustration.

“Then a couple of years later, webrings popped up,” Radziwill said. “You’d get a block of code and put it on the bottom of your site’s HTML page, and it would embed a link to the next website related to this one. Someone else would manage the list of what could come next, so it was a great way to increase your exposure. The people putting together the lists for the webrings were generally pretty upstanding, so we didn’t even think about sabotage.”

Webrings are another pre-Google artifact that recalls an era when microcommunities sprang up, not unlike those in the BBS era, from groups of people sharing niche interests, sometimes even local to one another in the real world. Before monolithic aggregators like Reddit, webrings were one of a handful of ways to find sites focused on the topics you were interested in.

That mattered because the web had not yet become a pure retrieval machine. It still had a culture of exploration, and many services were designed to help users browse topical categories rather than fire a query into a universal index. In that world, a webring or directory was not a compromise. It was often the main event.

Directories before algorithms

Yahoo is the best-known example of this early logic. It began as a human-edited guide to the web, organized into nested subject categories and maintained by people rather than fully automated ranking systems. For a young web, that approach was surprisingly effective: Human editors could identify quality sites, filter obvious junk, and impose a sense of order on a medium that was still expanding rapidly.

“I was a sysadmin for an ‘ecommerce shop’ in 1995 and 1996,” Radziwill told me, “and when we would turn up websites for new clients, the highlight of our process was submitting the site to Yahoo. Yahoo was like the Yellow Pages, but only for websites. There was a form you would fill out, and...