The first thing to remember about the pre-Google Internet is that there was no built-in assumption that you could search for everything. Many users found pages through Yahoo-style directories, bookmarks, newsgroups, email signatures, and links from site to site because the web was still small enough that human organization could compete with machine indexing.

No mention of the favorite of every bored person online in the 90s: typing random words and adding ‘.com’ to the end to see what comes up. I would be shocked if less than 50% of people at the time discovered bored.com that way.