Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment - Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/remembering-the-pre-google-web-when-search-was-an-experiment/ The real story of pre-Google search is not that early engines were inferior. It’s that they reflected a different Internet entirely, one where directories mattered, crawling was still an art, ranking was fragile, and the idea of “search” had not yet hardened into a single dominant interface.