> But in the early 90’s, nothing like this existed on the web. The concept, however, was not unheard of. Archie was a system that used crawling to help users find FTP files, and is commonly known as the Internet’s first search engine.<p>There's also Veronica - a play on the Archie comic strip - which crawled gopherspace. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)</a><p>But I actually came here to mention a different sort of search that existed around 1994 or so.<p>Someone had a modified version of Mosaic which would crawl and search all documents which were one or two links away from the current URL.<p>That is, if you are on, say, <a href="https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/how-we-searched-before-search/" rel="nofollow">https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/how-we-searched-before-search...</a> and did a search for "Veronica" then it would look search that page, and then find and follow all of the links in the page and search <i>them</i>. And even repeat for another link.<p>This would help if you remembered that you found X connected to Y, and while you can remember X you don't quite remember where Y was.<p>> At the time, NCSA was best known for Mosaic, later Netscape Navigator, later Mozilla Firefox.<p>Their own link says that "Netscape’s browser was a complete rewrite of Mosaic. ... The newly formed company didn’t have a right to any of the code that their programmers wrote when they were at NCSA."
The "back links" and curated directories (Yahoo) worked just fine in the early internet. It made discovery actually a lot of fun. There was magic to it that is long gone.