I think you're being nostalgic for something you don't remember very well. In that era, Google would return a match based on words that appear in the links to

I think you're being nostalgic for something you don't remember very well. In that era, Google would return a match based on words that appear in the links to a URL but not in the article itself, meaning that it was easy to produce "Googlebombs". For example, from 2005-2007 the top hit for "miserable failure" was the Wikipedia article for George W. Bush. See https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/google-bombs/ https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/google-bombs/ for some of the "better" ones.