this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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I was ~8 years old when the search engine wars were going on. Even as close to the "pre-google" age as I was, I literally cannot conceive of existence without it nor fathom how difficult some (relatively basic) things must've been.
Every single band had their own website, and email addresses. And every candy, pop or snack had to have a poorly made flash game or two.
Lifesavers had some good Flash and Shockwave games
This is not something I woke up today expecting to come across.
Talk about a very specific deep pull from a liminal space in space and time, kudos, sir!
Remember stick death?
If you've seen it how could you forget lol
People pulled map pages out of a phone book and marked them up to take with them if they needed to find a new location in town.
I was in my teens during the "search engine wars," and I distinctly remember my elementary school librarian showing off the brand new computerized card catalog when I was in kindergarten. Ran on a Mac. They gave up trying to teach us how to use a card catalog at some point in middle school; I'm not convinced they bothered putting one in the library for the newly built middle school that opened in 2000.
You just followed links or guessed web addresses.
When I finally discovered "www" was just a subdomain I was stumped.
Also open directories were a big thing where a webserver just showed a list of public files instead of a website.