In the mid-’90s, the web exploded but searching for anything felt like haggling with proto-search engines. Sites like AltaVista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves promised to tame chaos, each with its own quirks.

The real story of pre-Google search is not that early engines were worse; it’s that they reflected a different internet where directories mattered, crawling was an art, ranking was fragile, and the idea of ‘search’ had yet to solidify into one dominant interface.

A look back shows us the first web had no assumption you could search for everything. Many users found pages through Yahoo-style directories or links from site to site in a Wild West of discoverability.

Before engines became the main public interface, resources like Usenet showed people how to organize and find information online. Conceived in 1979, it gave users topic-based newsgroups and a culture of distributed discussion making information feel social before major web engines arrived.

Nicole M Radziwill remembers Usenet as a way to unearth interesting content: ‘It was the way to find websites that might interest you. People would put links in their posts, and awareness grew organically.’