There was a point before search engines of course. And, there was a point before people outside of, say a university, had any real Internet access.
But via my personal experiences in the late 90s, I recall search engines working just fine (eg, Alta Vista) then slowly degrading, then one day they were just completely useless. I mean, any search term would just returned page after page of spammy links. You could find nothing, ever.
There was Yahoo's curated list, with lots of volunteers keeping it going, but it had dead links, and was always a tiny tiny fraction of what was out there.
Just a few years later Google appeared, which at the time was absolutely gob smacking insanely good. It was no contest. Yet even this nascent google didn't have a large portion of the web, I remember people trying to get their links on larger sites so Google could find them. I think Google even had a submit link page too? Not sure when that appeared.
So I can imagine in this time period, someone might have had a list of links they found and spread by email. I remember using the 'bookmark' function of my browser a lot, it was easier than searching.
But via my personal experiences in the late 90s, I recall search engines working just fine (eg, Alta Vista) then slowly degrading, then one day they were just completely useless. I mean, any search term would just returned page after page of spammy links. You could find nothing, ever.
There was Yahoo's curated list, with lots of volunteers keeping it going, but it had dead links, and was always a tiny tiny fraction of what was out there.
Just a few years later Google appeared, which at the time was absolutely gob smacking insanely good. It was no contest. Yet even this nascent google didn't have a large portion of the web, I remember people trying to get their links on larger sites so Google could find them. I think Google even had a submit link page too? Not sure when that appeared.
So I can imagine in this time period, someone might have had a list of links they found and spread by email. I remember using the 'bookmark' function of my browser a lot, it was easier than searching.