Before the existence of Search Engines.
"There is nothing worthwhile on the web, and you will never find it anyway".
Before we have the search engines, we need to first have the Internet. At the beginning when Internet was created, there were not many people who were using it. Even so, it was rather hard to look for information because you could not search for a particular topic or interest etc. Looking for information was like playing a guessing game; you would never know what was behind the web page you click until its loaded.
Then, what was available were directories and lists on various topics which were managed and maintained by enthusiasts. (Refer to Fig.1 )
Fig 1. Net Service List (Click to enlarge)
The above is an example of a list managed by Scott Yanoff. This started off as a small list by Yanoff for his own personal use in 1991. Soon after, he started to get flooded by emails from grateful users on suggestions to the list. The list got longer and longer till Yanoff seemed to finally give up in 1995. The above (Fig 1) was what it looked like then.
By the late 1980s, the amount of web servers had gotten too huge to keep track of. The net was too loaded with information and it was almost impossible to rely on helpful hints by other friendly users.
Thus, clustering of innovations began to look for a solution to this major problem.
(Cited: Chapter4, Internet History)
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