I'm "relatively" new to the web. I started using it around 2004. To me, the only way to browse the web goes through Google. I don't think there's a single day I spent in front of the computer without me hitting Google at one point. I even use Google search when I'm specifically targeting Wikipedia or StackOverflow.
For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier decade of the Web? I'm assuming Google is not the first search engine available, but I'm pretty sure search engines were not the only way to go around.
I understand the concept behind the web, "a globe spanning network of computers linked by hyperlinks pointing to useful information". But was it as simple as that? You only had access to addresses you knew or links available on these pages? Where did you go to find interesting websites or how would you look for specific information (like, for instance, how would you research the working internals of a car engine for a school project?)
Things were a bit more varied. Netscape Navigator came with a default home page that included a number of different search engines which varied in different and sometimes interesting ways.
Because these search engines were not as powerful or accurate as Google at mining content from the web, you would tend to follow links more, relying on the overall navigational structure of the WWW rather than everything being the two step "Google terms -> Go to website in results page" process it typically is today.
Many people posted fragments called "web rings" on their web pages: these would be a linked "ring" of similar, related sites, grouped by a common interest in the subject matter. It was a useful (though very random and sometimes temperamental) way to discover similar sites and content.
Other sites had "guest books" where people could comment on the site and include a link to their own. There's little functional difference between guest books and today's blog commenting systems, except back then there was less traffic, so site owners tended to actually read the comments, respond to them often, and follow the links of the commenters back to their own sites.
Then SEO spam came along, and eventually most people realised 90% of the links in comments were probably not worth following. Then Google added nofollow, so the chances were the only person who would ever find your site through comments were the owner of the site you posted on - if you were very lucky and it wasn't buried in a sea of spam or one-shot snarks.
> For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier decade of the Web? I'm assuming Google is not the first search engine available, but I'm pretty sure search engines were not the only way to go around.
Yahoo! used to have humans looking at websites and adding them to an index. Yes, someone would send in a link to a porn website, and someone on the porn indexing team would view the site and add it to an index.
Curation efforts like this were important. People built web-rings for similar content; Usenet FAQs listed useful sites.
But people didn't just use WWW. They used Usenet, sometimes Gopher or telnet, ftp, and email. Or they were part of some other online community that had a www gateway. The prices now seem eye-watering.
And this is at a time when people had slow modems and usually paid for the telephone calls too. Thus, offline readers (things like BlueWave for email and fidonet) were popular.
Your last paragraph: I'd have a look through the newsgroup lists for relevant groups. I'd subscribe, fetch headers, look for a faq, retrieve the faq, and read that. I'd lurk the group for a bit, and try to do my own work. Then, after I'd learnt the group for a bit and participated in other stuff I'd try to ask a good question, with links to how far I'd got and an attempt at a correct reply.
Yahoo! was pretty good once you got the hang of rules. HotBot, dogpile, altavista (and astalavista) were also handy. But Google really was revolutionarily good.
I remember around the time CompuServe bought The Source, CIS was charging based on the speed of your connection (I think $12.80/hr was for a 9600 baud connection). There were several products to minimize your online time that would script connections - go to your favorite forums, download new messages, post anything you had pending, and hang up.
When AOL came on the scene, they eventually overtook the old walled-garden players by tactics like providing access to Usenet and the web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September was an unfortunate fallout from that), and provided a much cheaper pricing model. CIS tried to catch up by buying the Spry company, using its browser (basically a branded NCSA Mosaic), releasing scripts for Trumpet Winsock to get to the net from a CompuServe x.25 trunk, and added the option to use that same net connection to telnet back into CompuServe.
It was confusing, caused too much network traffic, and CompuServe mismanaged it all, and ultimately collapsed, to be bought out by AOL... who eventually lost relevance outside of the chat universe.
Seconding the emphasis on "Internet != Web" being more true for the 90's user. It wasn't until 1998 or so that the family computer transitioned from an dial-up shell account with 5mb disk quota (crl.com, which no longer exists) to SLIP/PPP with NetZero. The Web experience via shell account was Lynx-only, and Usenet was still a major source of information, albeit it was riddled with trolling and spam by then.
It is precisely as you say: Simple as that. You knew of some sites, and you had links from those sites to others. Beyond that, you could take some big names and guess if they had a site. As for your "working internals of a car engine" example, in 1995 I would have instead cracked open a physical encyclopedia at a library. It really was the rise of search engines that helped grant the internet that "Learn/find anything about anything" aura.
All I remember interacting with until about 1997 was a handful of consumer brand's websites, the brands for which I already knew of and could easily guess their domain name.
There were indeed search engines pre-google, the "big four" and a host of smaller ones.
There were also "directories" that were very useful. Yahoo's at least is still around. If you wanted to find a bunch of sites on a specific topic you'd use those. But a lot of the time you would follow links between sites - most sites would have a dedicated page of "links to other sites that we think are good/related". A sibling has mentioned webrings which were also a thing.
I never used AOL, but it had a "keyword" system that worked a bit like twitter - you could look up a keyword and see a bunch of sites that claimed to be related to it.
And it was a lot more common to type in a URL that you found offline - books came with their homepage on (they probably still do).
Before Google there was plenty of ways to find links. Other search engines (e.g. Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, Altavista), link directories (e.g. Yahoo, Netscape Directory), magazines (e.g. Wired, .Net), content-driven ISPs (e.g. AOL, CompuServe, eWorld).
Quite. Encyclopædia Brittanica, and the 5% rule for photocopying. Later it was CD encyclopædias like Microsoft Encarta - the use case that persuaded my parents to buy a new-fangled "sound card", as opposed to the ulterior use case (to play Doom)...
When I began in 1992 the "home page of the internet" was Usenet. The reason I installed my first web browser was to be able to follow URLs referenced by conversations on Usenet. (That first browser was obtained by "anonymous FTP", which is the main way that software and certain kinds of documents like Usenet FAQs were distributed.)
>for instance, how would you research the working internals of a car engine for a school project?
Before search engines, I would consult my personal library of books, which included a paper encyclopedia, or visit a library and look up "automobile engines" in the subject index of the card catalog. Or maybe ask a friend.
Of course, most of the things I look up in search engines nowadays I did not even try to research or ask about before search engines: I just did without the information. It wasn't so bad :)
For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier decade of the Web? I'm assuming Google is not the first search engine available, but I'm pretty sure search engines were not the only way to go around.
I understand the concept behind the web, "a globe spanning network of computers linked by hyperlinks pointing to useful information". But was it as simple as that? You only had access to addresses you knew or links available on these pages? Where did you go to find interesting websites or how would you look for specific information (like, for instance, how would you research the working internals of a car engine for a school project?)