Introduction
The internet is young and search engines even younger. This leaves a period of time in internet history where people did not have access to search engines to conveniently search the web as we do today. Yet people still used the internet, so let us explore how online resources were found before search engines.
Researching this specific period of time is rather difficult. Authoritative sources on the topic are few and far between. Furthermore, we run into the issue of defining what makes a search engine. Modern search engines track a multitude of datapoints to accurately determine relevance to your search. Back then, some semblance of search emerged fairly quickly. Website directories offered search, but their algorithms were much simpler and only matched website titles instead of checking their content. For simplicity, we will focus on surfing the web without any automated search.
Finding Websites
When the internet was in its early days, the best way to find websites was through directories. These directories were a phone book for websites. They could exist either in written form or online. Internet service providers often maintained such an index for customer’s convenience. If you needed to find a particular company website, your best bet was to try entering their company name followed by “.com” and hoping for the best.
Screenshot of archived GNN home page from oreilly.com.
As a website owner, your best bet for recognition was to spread by word of mouth. However, there was another option. Many websites included a “links” section that would link to other websites. These websites could be websites the author liked or other websites with similar content. This phenomenon created what we call “web rings” where groups of websites in a particular niche would all link to each other. Each website would help the others get recognized and they all would benefit.
From there, it did not take long before we began to see some resemblance of search on the web.
2 Responses
Good points. Sometimes I really do have to think to remember that the internet is so young, since to me and a lot of the people around me, we know it to always be there.
I really like your insights and expressing how much harder it was for people to search before search engines existed. I think it is very interesting that people would have to guess what a company’s website would be called by simply typing the name followed by “.com”. It makes me appreciate how easy it is to just “google” something and get an overwhelming number of instant results.