Using the Internet Without Utilising Search Engines

Navigating the Internet or World Wide Web without search engines

[bouncybunny]

OK, I could do some chargeable work, or I could post random thoughts on an online forum. Decisions, decisions...

I almost called the thread heading, 'Imagine a world without Google' but I didn't think that conveyed the right message and we would have got bogged down.

I suppose what I am really after is methods that other people use to locate and use information on 'the web' (let's stick to that so as to avoid definitions of what the internet is or isn't - email, ftp etc...).

If nobody had thought to invent a search engine, back in the dark old days, how would we locate information? Would we simply be following links from the pages of other web sites. Would we be members of many more newsgroups, email newsletters...? How would the web itself look?

OK, that's all about 'what if'. So, accepting that search engines *do* very much exist, what other methods of promotion, navigation and communication do we use? More importantly, with search becoming increasingly polarised and controlled around fewer and fewer sources, what other methods could we, or should we, use or be developing.?

Ho hum, back to work.

[ronin]

Search engines were rubbish in 1994.
We had:

Newsgroups
Yahoo! Directory
Yahoo! What's New
Word of mouth
Sensible type-in guesses like [company name] + .com or [university name] + .edu (or .ac.uk in the UK)

It was like walking around in a very, very dark room with an LED to light your way.

[bouncybunny]

I remember when Alta Vista started up and used to return some uncannily accurate search results, much like Google now. I pretty much stopped using Excite and Infoseek. Then it all wen t a bit wrong.

[mack]

Yea I have to agree, Alta was an awsome engine in it's day, although the benchmark then was a lot easier to reach and the web was a lot smaller.

The yahoo directory was pretty cool, Back in the day it actualy felt cool to browse a directory, how you just type a few words and hit search. Directory browsing was a bit of an art though.

Spam mail: Yep, before the se's I bet they where a lot more effective.

Mack.

[jake66]

I used to just follow links and guestbook postings from sites I liked.
Once google gained in popularity, the use of doing such a thing came to a screeching halt. It was the end all be all of the internet and you could find anything.

I much prefer the link exploring though, which is far too dangerous to do nowadays. The amount of spam and viruses is sickening. Everytime I even catch a glimps of a spam posting on somebody's webpage I feel as though I may have lost a few IQ points..

[lammert]

One way of surfing I used in the past was with the topic directories of website page counter services. About ten years ago everyone who wanted to know the number of visitors to his site put up a small graphics box with the text YYYY visitors since September 6. 1996. You see these counters still on some mom-and-pop sites but the larger sites now use their own statistics packages or Google Analytics.

Some of those website counter services had surfable directories of all sites which used their counters. By sorting the sites on number of visits per day, you could get a quite a good SPAM free subset in a given area of important and worth-to-view sites. It is a little bit like surfing a directory like DMOZ, but then with a much larger base of sites, and some sort of quality ranking in the form of visitors per day values.

[reprint]

dont forget webrings :) you could follow a topic from site to site.

[jimbeetle]

the topic directories of website page counter services

Wow, completely forgot about those. A six-day-old site could be number 1 (With a bullet!) and get a bunch of visits each day. Of course, I'm talking tens or hundreds of visits, but then, as bouncybunny said, AV came along. That was a wild ride.