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.
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.