My kid asked me why we didn't just use Google back then and I had to stop and think

I was showing my 12 year old an old webring page from my '98 GeoCities site about X-Files fan theories. She looked at the Netscape browser and asked, 'But why didn't you just Google it?' I told her it didn't exist yet, and she said, 'So you just... wandered?' That word hit different. We didn't wander, we explored. You had to know a specific URL, or find a link on a directory like Yahoo, or get a tip from a friend on AIM. There was no algorithm feeding you the next thing. You had to build your own map, link by link. Does anyone else feel like that changed how we find stuff online forever?

2 comments

2 Comments

faithk921mo ago

My 1996 webring felt like a real community though.

coleman.christopher1mo ago

Yeah, my buddy spent a whole weekend once trying to find a cheat code for a game. He found a forum link on a site like @faithk92 mentioned, then clicked through three different webrings, and finally downloaded a text file from some guy's Tripod page. It was a whole quest. You really did have to dig for stuff back then.