The Forgotten Era of Web Search: Chaos, Exploration, and Human Curation

The pre-Google web was vastly different from today's Internet landscape. In the mid-1990s, search engines like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves were not as sophisticated as modern-day Google. These early engines reflected a chaotic and dynamic environment where directories mattered, crawling was an art form, ranking was fragile, and searching for information felt like an elaborate negotiation.

Before the dominance of search engines, users relied on human-edited guides like Yahoo, which organized websites into subject categories. Nicole M. Radziwill, a systems administrator and programmer from the '90s, recalled using Usenet to find interesting content online. She got on Usenet in 1990 as a student and found it delightful, especially the alt.* and misc.* groups.

Webrings were another pre-Google artifact that allowed users to discover sites focused on specific topics. These microcommunities sprang up from groups of people sharing niche interests, sometimes even local to one another in the real world. Before the rise of monolithic aggregators like Reddit, webrings were one of the few ways to find relevant content.

AltaVista became a defining search engine of the 1990s due to its speed and broad index. It made searching feel less like browsing a catalog and more like querying a giant machine. However, it was still limited compared to modern engines like Google.