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Sure they did. Search engines and hierarchical directories didn't take off until late 1994, and the first link aggregators like WebRing didn't come along along
by roryirvine 1y ago
Sure they did. Search engines and hierarchical directories didn't take off until late 1994, and the first link aggregators like WebRing didn't come along along for at least another year after that.
Before then, website discovery was almost entirely word of mouth, supplemented by a little bit of self-promotion on various mailing lists and newsgroups.
The only other routes were asking your local sysadmin, taking a trip to your local bookstore to browse the few web-related pages in the Whole Internet Guide and Catalogue, or a handful of links in magazines like Mondo 2000 and Wired - but they were very minor, and tended only to be used by true neophytes.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Search engines and hierarchical directories didn't take off until late 1994, and the first link aggregators like WebRing didn't come along along for at least another year after that. > Before then, website discovery was almost entirely word of mouth Yeah, but before that there were almost no websites to discover, and no one discovering them; even by the end of 1994—generally held out as the first year websites aimed at the general public were available at all, and, as you note, also the year search engines and directories took off, displacing any word of mouth as the main discovery route, there were still only a little over two thousand websites in total.