After the boom in the worldwide web in 1993, the internet revolution changing manifolds. Imagine, you are in 1997, wearing something that everyone used to wear at that time.

One of your friends came and discussed a movie that you have seen. He tells you that the actions of an actor were really awesome, but you realize that the actor was not in that movie. But he seems to be adamant that the actor was in that movie. So, you both decide to log on to your desktop. 

You worked hard and connected the internet connection after 40 minutes of hard work.

Now, what you would have done?

How before Google, did people settle asinine disputes, and used to find information?

Google search dominates over 90% of a market that includes search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and privacy-driven DuckDuckGo. But before Google's personalized, ad-driven search algorithm took over almost everything we can find on the web, there were website directories and indexed search engines that assembled web resources by topic.

The earliest web search engines were directories of websites curated by people. These web ontologists (Yahoo called the "surfers") would read all the web pages about particular topics and then rank them. Eventually, this human-driven model of categorization was replaced by crawling websites with bots (sometimes called spiders), then ranking websites by their reliability and relevance to different kinds of search queries. In the early 1990s, there were about twenty different search engines to choose from, including WebCrawler, Lycos, AltaVista, and Yandex.

Similar to library catalogs, these search indexes were compiled and organized by topic, content, structure, and subject. Early search engines were designed so users could navigate to bundles of hyperlinked resources across different high-level categories like "News", "Travel", "Sports", and "Business". Columns of broad categories crammed together full of blue hyperlinks for users to choose from made early search engine homepages look like the crowded index in the back of a textbook.

It is important to remember that 1990s web searching had different goals and incentives for people "surfing the web". In early online cultures, finding a fact or product wasn't always the goal of searching. Instead, search engines helped people discover and explore digital resources and experience the worldwide web. Web search in the 1990s had less ad-targeting and gave users more control to explore, even if the results were rudimentary and didn't always reliably filter out dark content. Compared to today's search experiences, early web search was more of a questing experience. By quest, I mean taking an active role in navigating and discovering content, in ways that personalized, curated search platforms like Google and Facebook have largely usurped with audience-targeted advertisement.

Today, when we are talking about search, we are usually not thinking about browsing indexes or visiting a webpage. Instead, we are thinking about scrolling and swiping information from feeds and apps that bring together lots of different content and user profiles into one stream. Or maybe we are expecting a precise answer to be served up as an extracted snippet of information from an online resource. 

Most contemporary search features, especially search within platforms like Facebook, Amazon, or the App Store have monetized the process even further by collecting more and more user data to the point where tracking user behavior like search terms and browsing habits are nearly always required for people to make use of these increasingly essential services. 

When we ask ourselves, what we have lost in considering these earlier search engines, we should try and imagine all the possibilities we have foreclosed by granting a monopoly on searching all the world's online, digital information to one firm like Google, and then ask ourselves: how else can I surd the web?

"The earliest web search engines were directories of websites curated by people"

In the 90s, Yahoo and AltaVista did pretty well. But computerized information retrieval is a very old field, dating back at least to the 1950s. The first commercial online remote access systems date back to the early 1970s.

Google did not invent information retrieval by any means-it built on very old methods of documentation, such as those of Paul Otlet, who invented the Universal Decimal Classification in the 1930s, and was among the parents of modern information science.

The first search engines were, in fact, virtual libraries, and many people understood the value of libraries as a public good. As automation increased, and librarians and experts were replaced by AI, we lost a lot. The public good that could have been realized was replaced by massive advertising platforms, like Yahoo and Google !