In 2017 somebody asked a question that sounds increasingly less sarcastic every year:
Does anyone remember websites?
Read the original TTTThis page
The argument was simple. Search engines had become incredibly good at finding specific answers, but something got lost in the process: wandering into pages built by hobbyists, academics and technically inclined weirdos because they cared about something.
The page contrasts that older web with a commercial web where personalized sites are harder to surface among optimized pages built to rank, sell or convert.
It is not a claim that everything used to be better. Plenty of old sites were broken, ugly, abandoned or useless.
The point is narrower and better: searching is not the same thing as surfing.
Finding what you did not know to ask for
When the page hit Hacker News in November 2017, it drew hundreds of comments and nearly 900 points. The discussion immediately became a catalog of people remembering the exact experience the essay described: clicking through somebody’s handwritten pages and discovering useful material that no search query would have occurred to them to type.
That distinction still matters.
Modern search is optimized around intent. You ask for a thing and receive increasingly polished attempts at that thing.
The old personal web often worked sideways. You arrived looking for batteries and ended up reading a homemade test bench. You searched for one obscure technical term and discovered somebody’s entire research notebook. Links were not merely citations. They were trails.
That is why small directories, webrings, blogrolls and manually curated lists keep reappearing. They solve a different problem from search engines.
They help you discover something before you have language for it.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is basically an industrialized version of that impulse: stop asking the web only for answers and start poking through its forgotten sheds again.
The original TTTThis page is flaky now, which is almost too appropriate.
The idea survived anyway.