[digitalzombie]

Uh... pretty close knit. There were no search engines. There were only directories with dedication toward search hobby/interesting.

I was pretty big into anime fanfic so anipike was the web directory I went to. The fan sites via xoom, geocities, tripod, angelfire are linked via web ring. Web ring is like a circle of website with similar interest and individual anime website would have a web ring to help find other similar website within the web ring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

The ads weren't bad it was banners and it blinks or slide across like marquee html tag. The majority of the web ads felt like print paper ads less scientific like today. Today ads they got metric, funnel, and trying to get more eyeballs on it, very gamey to get your attention which I believe leads to addiction and click bait stuff.

The user involvement was less, social aspect seems to be around hobbies. Now a day you can try to catch up with your friends via facebook, snapchat, etc.. it seems like everybody is trying to get approval by online friends by having that awesome picture while traveling and doing stuff.

There was a famous newsletter I follow for my fanfiction too (rec.arts.anime.creative).

[tejtm]

And there was plain old searching. the idea that you could expect someone to hand you whatever you asked for had not been formed yet. So if you were interested, then you looked, reading everything gathered clues, scribbled down paths to check later.

No current results page with 73,345,507 entries will come close to finding a directory with bitmaps of planets/moons there for the asking deep in jpl or some place.

[bigger_cheese]

I wasn't that big into anime but I used to love Evangelion (I still do) after it aired on television here in Australia around 97/98 some of the first web pages I can remember visiting were fan pages for that series. The X Files was other big thing I use to look up online. I was pretty much obsessed with that TV show when I was a kid.

>The ads weren't bad it was banners and it blinks or slide across like marquee html tag.

I can definitely remember ads getting worse and worse. At first they weren't bad but by 1999 or so it was pretty horrendous popup ads were massively prevalent. I can remember needing to run a separate pop up blocker app before browsers started building blockers in.

HTML blink tags were definitely a thing there were some eye bleeding websites using blink.

Trying to use search engines for researching high school projects was a pain you'd need to use 5 or 6 different search engines - Lycos, Infoseek, Metacrawler, Yahoo etc and each search would give you different results you'd be lucky if 30% of results were relevant to your topic. Dial up was so slow as well (at least at my school) it often wasn't worth the time to try using internet for researching assignments. It wasn't until I started university and found out about online journals that it really became a useful research tool.

Plugins used to be a big thing stuff like Real Player, Shockwave, java applets etc I'm pretty sure at some point Flash basically killed all these but for a while it was kind of a wildwest. Video online was almost never worth it. It would take forever to download half the time you wouldn't have the right codec to play it and quality was generally so terrible it was borderline unwatchable - everything looked like one giant pixel.

I can remember being introduced to Slashdot it was the site for a while I was a pretty late comer and it was huge in the late 90's I used to check it multiple times a day.

[classichasclass]

> no search engines

There was Veronica in the Gopher days. It was always busy, but it was nice that it came from educational institutions (UNR's is what I used locally). I don't think anyone at UNR remembers they ran it.

Oh, and Archie.

[jerrysievert]

and altavista. OP noted a few things that started around the same time as altavista. fun was looking yourself up in altavista and being amazed.

webrings were fun, but I really have nostalgia for Archie and MUDs.

[cordonbleu]

and JUGHEAD

[monk_e_boy]

There were a ton of scavenger hunts. With questions like, what is the first rocket on the NASA home page. They were tricky with no search engines.