[tokioyoyo]

Because of the financial incentives, it would still end up with people doing things to drive traffic to their website though, no? Maybe because the web was smaller, and people looked at it as means "to explore curiosity" in the olden days it kinda worked differently... maybe I just got old, but I don't want to believe that.

[n1xis10t]

By “doing things to drive traffic to their website” do you mean trying to do SEO type things to manipulate search engine rankings? If so, I think that there are probably ways to rank that are immune to tampering.

Don’t worry, you’re not just old. The internet kind of sucks now.

[makapuf]

Google was neat in that you didn't see the content keyword spam either on the websites or the portal home pages. The Web was already full of shit (first ad banner was 1994? By 1999 you already had punch the monkey as classy content), but it was more ... organic and you could easily skip it.