Getting the initial traffic to your site was really hard in those days, the domain was really important for that.
I could gopher topics by early 90's, and Infoseek, Yahoo, WebCrawler, etc. were a full text search of pages by mid 90's.
I distinctly recall searching usenet across multiple servers.
Even before this, when data only flowed through uucp (or Fido), search was albeit queued, readily available.
Your mileage may have varied; i just want to be clear that it was not that it did not exist, but new-comers would have a steeper learning curve. Today, it is expected, nay, demanded as a human right to be able to search the entire internet from a uniform and single klick search box. (yes, old crotchety, "in my day..." :) )
(edit: misspelurating stuffage)
People started to understand how PageRank worked, and managed to get George W. Bush's official biography page at whitehouse.gov to the top of the search for "miserable failure." As I recall, this worked until at least 2008, maybe a couple years past that.
So you weren't a normal, mainstream, new user to the internet. You knew how to use it, you knew where to go to search.
I was the same in the 90s (minus Gopher skills), I learned about Yahoo, Altavista, Infoseek, etc. and became a wizard to my friends and some relatives because I could find things on the internet, didn't need to know the website address beforehand or click somewhere in AOL.
It did exist, it just wasn't accessible and generally available, nor it was a tool people knew how to use.
So domain names up to the early 2000s were pretty important to capture the mainstream market, not the Gophers.
Prior to that people would at least need to sit down and dedicate attention to whatever they were doing online at their desktop.
It required at least some technical base knowledge.
While nowadays pretty much everybody can, and will, pull out their smartphone even during very short breaks: It' all short attention span, relegated to devices were multi-tasking is way more of an hassle, which means people are also way less likely to do research on whatever they are discussing.
It's gotten to a point where in many places writing anything longer than Tweet length is considered something bad, as most peoples attention span just can't cope with long-form forum posts anymore.
Google and Pagerank changed all that, but up until then, it was all very tricky and each search engine had its niche- Yahoo with its directory, Ask Jeeves had a user friendly interface, lycos and altavista had some niches of their own as well that I can't quite recall- or maybe they just each had brief shining moments in the sun. At one point I had desktop software that was a meta crawler that would enter a query into each one. The full text searches on keywords that may or may not really be relevant to what you wanted were really not all that good.
We typed in a few things, but it didn't go anywhere.
I remember he called the browser a "web crawler", which was probably the search engine someone told him to use to find sites. We had no idea.
Otherwise, I have a lot of memories exploring the web by typing in words followed by TLDs and writing down the interesting ones. It was another year or two before aggregators cropped up, copying and returning the first ten results of any manual index.
Content discovery was next to non-existent. You had these directories like Y! or Lycos which more or less mirrored yellow pages. My group of friends would exchange interesting site links over e-mail, floppy disk or the good old way, write them down in a note book. Before you ask, internet surfing was only available in expensive public kiosks so browser book marks weren't of much use. Only when I got my own PC + internet in 2000 did I began using browser bookmarks.
And then Google became popular around 2002 just when I entered post-graduation and changed web surfing forever.
I think the limited time many people had on the internet (as you said, in some instances at Internet kiosks where you’d be limited to an hour at a time. Or on expensive dial up) probably contributed to people curating and sharing links offline between friends. But I do remember using search engines in that era specifically because AltaVista was widely regarded between myself and my peers to be the best search engine in terms of keyword syntax and the accuracy of the results. Remember this was the era before search engines popularised entering in natural language as a search query. Ask Jeeves (later renamed to just “Ask”) was actually the first to popularise that and even that was pre-2000 (it also largely sucked compared to keyword driven queries but I guess the tech wasn’t quiet there yet).
I think it was 1999 when my friends and I first discovered Google. Back then Google was keyword query based too. The natural language side of Google came much later (mid-2000s at a guess). But what sold Google was its minimalist home page and the accuracy of its results. The minimalist home page was novel because search engines were considered internet portals before Google. Yahoo! Would have online games, chat rooms, site recommendations and email all accessible from its landing page and it was a similar story for many of the other search engines as well. They considered themselves the homepage of the internet (and in many ways they were right). Whereas Google went the opposite way and said “let’s strip as much guff from our landing page as possible” and is modem uses really welcomed that (plus the accuracy of its results too). It’s ironic just how heavy Google’s landing page has become.
By 2000 the web had already felt like it had shifted from its adolescent years of anything goes and was starting to grow up. The stigma of meeting strangers online was fading and businesses were adopting the web as more than just a niche marketing tool - in part helped by Online payments becoming a thing with PayPal, WorldPay etc.
Still a winning business model, because this line could easily describe Facebook.
Time and time again you see these big monolithic applications get displaced by newer more focused applications and people love them because these newer applications run faster / is easier to use / etc etc. Then as those applications gain popularity new features need to be built to continue growth. Whether it is through feature requests, to fight off competitors with other features, or just the businesses way of finding new ways to look individuals into a walled garden....soon this focused application becomes yet another behemoth that people start to moan about. Eventually something new, shiny and focused grabs the public’s attention and we flock to that like the fickle herd of pack animals that we are.
I think I still have it, and if I can find it I'll reply with details.
It was fantastic for finding things, because you could explore it, and because search was garbage back then.
I think the whole pets.com and travel.com is just the usual marketing logic at work and not really related to the limitation of search engines. Its just shady marketing tricks, a bit like how we see the .biz and other gimmicky tlds today.
Curiously, that domain now redirects to some concrete company, Hanson guitars existing instead at hanson-guitars.com.
I don't think sex.com was an expected direct hit back then - and if I'm remembering correctly, even in the later 90s, you would have had to type http://www.sex.com to get it to even load right - there wasn't a ton of convenience and most browsers relied on a heavy set of built-in bookmarks to get people into portals and search engines.
That said, I believe it was totally true that they likely paid six or seven figures for a year or longer deal to guarantee top three for a ton of porn search terms. I assume that area was allowed to be seedy in order to mitigate risk of even allowing that content to be included in the first place, and companies didn't feel bad getting money from porn sites who had a lot to throw around.
For context, squatters would often land you on some bad sites and URI syntax was unforgiving, so it just isn’t something I remember most doing. There was a general desire for simple branding on the off chance you can get it typed in or printed on a business card or in an ad, but it was not the common entry point.
Also of note: UX expectations back then didn’t trust typing into a box and seeing any result first - it really was the solid ranking of Google results that made that UX something browser vendors adopted or more cynically, that Google pushed first with partnerships then with ownership of Chrome.
What changed is the cultural mainstream acceptance.. that something like PornHub can be a mainstream company. The market itself was alive and well pretty much the day after the movie camera left Menlo Park.
This wasn’t a technical requirement though, sex.com would’ve loaded just fine if it had an A record set.
This is back when you could fire up mosaic and read the what's new on the internet today :-)
People used to do that on the x.25 network to find interesting sites.
Google did nothing particularly innovative or new, they just had the cleanest interface, their page was fast, and provided good results. That's what made them successful.
Edit: On a side note, I feel really old now. :(
I wonder what it’ll be to fix the Internet this time around?
I do remember one point of difference was Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” option that just sent you to the first search result.
I really liked that feature, but I’m guessing was removed in favor of growing impressions and ad revenues.
minimalism has its good points, but falsely attributing it to google's success probably focused too much attention to it in the internet of the 2010s.
Again, less of an issue now with more intelligent search engines. (Although strong brands still tend to a get a lot of traffic via searches on their name...)
It wasn't as good as google is now, but search engines of the time did allow for discovery.
Google seems to have banned all the interesting wild content that made the internet so fascinating in its early days. Blogs seem to have disappeared completely for instance and I have to specify the site to search to find anything e.g. site:Reddit.com
However it does have an amazing ability to find comments on stackoverflow relevant to my needs based on a few keywords.
Plus Web Directories, and Link lists where IMO better than keyword searches. They allowed you to find and follow topics faster.
The explosion of content and google has made discovery harder unless you are one of the Top sites or platforms. All it takes it being on one of them, not being a good quality content.
Want to sell a widget, you better sell it through amazon because chances are Google is going to index those results as the Top Results not your webstore. Even manufacturers that want to sell direct have to also have Amazon stores because the Amazon listing is the one of the only ways to get a top search spot
On the other hand if you were in yahoo you were online. Type "books" into yahoo though and you'd be more likely to find books.com than amazon.com as the top page, and clearly "books.com" would sell books, who knows what "amazon.com" sells, something about Brazilian rivers?
That used to be true with Amazon. Not anymore, not for me. Now I have to decide if I trust and endless array of 3rd party sellers. It is often just easier to buy from a manufacturer’s website since I know I’m getting the real thing and it’s not expired or otherwise screwed up. Maybe I pay a few more bucks, but I’m ok with that for a lot of things. (Exception: books and used)
And every time I decide to buy directly from the manufacturer I get punished - bought a Lenovo laptop around September, laptop turned up with a broken screen. Took over 3 weeks to get Lenovo UK to replace it and it was an exercise in absolute frustration, I could write a small essay about it. I was so upset at myself for not buying it from Amazon - I know if I did and had the same problem I would literally have a replacement posted to me the following day without having to fill out a dozen forms and spend hours on the phone with customer support.
So many people are trying to get rich quick by buying aliexpress stock, selling it through Amazon. There's just so much crap on the website now
And being Chinese, most of it likely isn't even legal to sell without a genuine CE mark
As then, though, if you are not specific or willing to lean on a name brand, search is effectively broken.