Well let’s see. Often I’d be given a URL in email, newsgroups, or IRC. There were also web rings of sites that were loosely related, so I could follow the ring. Sometimes I’d just randomly explore. AltaVista came in with a search engine. But soon there was an even better one called HotBot. It crawled the entire web every day, which was amazing at the time. To search these, I basically had to pretend that the site I wanted to find existed and type in the key words that existed on the theoretical site. Then if I was lucky, the site would magically appear as a result; almost like I’d conjured it. Or at least that’s how it felt to me. Hmm… kinda like Stable Diffusion?
Well let’s see. Often I’d be given a URL in email, newsgroups, or IRC. There were also web rings of sites that were loosely related, so I could follow the ring. Sometimes I’d just randomly explore. AltaVista came in with a search engine. But soon there was an even better one called HotBot. It crawled the entire web every day, which was amazing at the time. To search these, I basically had to pretend that the site I wanted to find existed and type in the key words that existed on the theoretical site. Then if I was lucky, the site would magically appear as a result; almost like I’d conjured it. Or at least that’s how it felt to me. Hmm… kinda like Stable Diffusion?
Those sound like good times! Kinda jealous ngl.