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

Before Google became the gatekeeper, the mid-nineties web was a patchwork of search engines—AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves—each with their own quirks. Per Ars Technica, the real story isn't that these early engines were inferior to today's search. It's that they reflected a fundamentally different internet. Users discovered pages through directories, bookmarks, newsgroups, and links, because the web was small enough for human curation to matter. Search engines were just one part of a messier ecosystem—one where the internet hadn't yet assumed you could find everything.

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