Nope. Yahoo, yes. Alta Vista, no. Also, WebCrawler no, Lycos no, Ask Jeeves yes, Infoseek yes.
Archie indexed ftp sites. That is much more than a phone book. You looked for a paper, say, and archie told you which, if any, ftp site held it. Then you went there and ftp’d it. It was a game changer. It is hard to know what more it could have done since there were no web sites.
There still is and it appears to still have traffic!
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.fan.cecil-adams
Dig deep enough there, you’ll find that I started posting there in '94.
Hah 
That reminds me of the situation with GenBank, which was started in the 80’s as a repository for DNA sequences. At the time, DNA sequencing was labor-intensive and got you only a few hundred base pairs at a time, so there wasn’t much in it; you could subscribe to a paper copy of collected GenBank depositions that would arrive as a hardbound volume every so often, with page after page of little blocks of sequence from random things. At some point they upgraded to CD’s; when I was in grad school the lab had a couple of sets from the early 90’s kicking around, each with the entirety of the then-current GenBank collection on one or two discs. (They were totally obsolete by then, I should have grabbed one as a souvenir…)
Then automated sequencing took off, and loads of labs started sequencing big chunks of DNA and then entire genomes; by now, if you wanted a physical copy of GenBank I think you’d need a couple of 18-wheelers to carry the servers around in… Technology marches on, and nobody anticipates these data explosions. 
I remember one other way of finding sites online: physical books. I had a small handful of them that I got around 1996 or so. There would be a list of addresses of all kinds, HTTP URLs, FTP addresses, gopher, telnet, mailing lists, IRC, and probably something else I’m forgetting.
One I remember is a mailing list that you could use to use FTP sites if the only Internet access you had was email. You’d email your FTP commands. I believe there may have been one for the web, too.
I also very much remember discovering Yahoo search (Powered by Google) and using that instead of those books. I think most of the books went unused after that point–to my chagrin today, since there were some pretty interesting sounding sites that I never checked out that might have been awesome.
I think you’re confusing UUCP with Internet/Arpanet. That {cbvax, decvax, ihnp4} stuff is meta-notation from UUCP bang paths, which coexisted with domainist Arpa email addresses (sometimes in the same address!) and are still seen in email and netnews message headers.
With Internet email, you only specify one domain, and you don’t know or care about the path. UUCP bang paths made you plot the entire course.
In the 1990-1997-ish timeframe, we had physical Internet directories that would list interesting websites and FTP sites. One of the famous ones was the Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog, but there were others. Many pages were spent categorizing sites by topic. If you were into “My Little Pony”, you could look in the “M” listings and find a listing for Patty’s My Little Pony Princess Paradise Portal along with its URL and a brief summary. Obviously, these books did age, but not as fast as you would think. Catalogs would be mostly good for two, three, or maybe even five years because the Internet actually wasn’t changing that fast.
As for email access, you are right. Just getting your hands on your own email address was literally a big thing in the 90’s, up until about 1998 or so when it was no longer such a rare thing. If you had an email address in 1995, you were somebody. You were either a highly technical person, a rich person, or someone who had connections.
I had an email address in 1984 and I wasn’t any of those things. Colleges and universities were signing up by the boatload. In 1984, my son at Princeton had email (a few months before I did) and by late 1985 my daughter at Williams had one too. Of course we had connections; that’s what having email meant.
Good points. It’s worth noting that many Usenet servers only sent and received updates once per day or possibly even once every few days. Bandwidth and connections were expensive. If you posted a message to alt.stuff.lame via your local server, that server might dial up a bigger server that night to upload your message (remember dial-up modems?), then that server would send your message to other servers that dialed in to that one. It could take a few days for your message to get to a point where your cousin in Memphis would see it on his newsfeed.
Or just some schlub in college… I had two, count 'em, two email addresses by 1993. One was my Computing and Information Services account that the university gave everyone, and the other one was my Computer Science department account.
I eventually ended up just putting a .forward file in my CS department account and forwarding everything to my CIS account, since it had more space allocated, etc…
By about 1996 or so, there were really weird hybrid BBSes where you could dial in locally, but send internet email- I think it may have been some kind of Fidonet/SMTP gateway, but I don’t know for sure. I do know I did email a girl I had the hots for using that method while she was in Europe for the summer while her professor dad was on sabbatical there.
As I mentioned upthread, there was definitely gatewaying of messages between heterogeneous networks before the Internet swallowed everything in the late 1990s. Fidonet Echoes were available as Usenet newsgroups, and vice-versa, Usenet was originally carried over the UUCP dial-up network and gatewayed to and from the Internet, the BITNET mainframe network had Internet gateways, and so on. And, of course, the one thing all of those networks had in common was email, so a given email message could be gatewayed a few times before reaching its recipient.
These days, all of the heterogeneous networks are used as methods to shift IP packets around, gateways are performed on the packet level and therefore completely invisible, and it’s impossible to tell how many different physical networks your traffic passed through with complete certainty.
What I mean is that while it was an automated search, as far as I know it didn’t have any kind of “smarts”, like Google’s Bayesian based search or even the algorithms that the earliest Web crawlers in 1993-94 used. IIRC Archie was just a fancy keyword search program for anonymous FTP.
In that sense, it was more like an automated phone lookup than a genuine search engine like Google.
Bleeping newbies.
Which we contributed to. Which was then taken over and declared a business by Yahoo–the info voluntarily provided and organized, not their other services–and they became billionaires.
That business model on the Net, still going strong, burns my balls. Always has.
I think you’re trying to define “search engine” way too narrowly and draw distinctions which don’t exist. Yes, search engines prior to Google tended to be primitive. Yes, they tended to be fooled by keyword spam. Yes, it became hard to find things using them as the Web grew and spammers caught on to how easy it was to spoof those search engines.
However, a bad, simplistic car is still a car. A Model T is a car even though its controls are rebarbative and it would never be as useful or as reliable as the cheapest Toyota on the lot. Google advanced search engines, it didn’t invent them, and not even Google has ever claimed otherwise.
“Rebarbative.”
Nice.
I had a web page that was listed in a version of this. I remember looking myself up while in a book store somewhere.
I wish I had a copy of it now, but I don’t know how many different versions there were, or how hard it would be to find.
You can find a number of those books in small-town libraries which are too understaffed and under-funded to do much in the way of collections management.
(Collections management: Weeding (removing) books and acquiring books. Libraries don’t keep things forever; they look at circulation numbers and decide which resources are meeting the needs of their patrons and which ones aren’t, and the ones which aren’t are sold by the pound to punters such as myself who can’t resist a good book sale. Some things get weeded based on the fact the binding’s falling off and the cover looks like someone’s used it as a boot scraper, other things are weeded because Boy George really didn’t reach the Valhalla of sustained cultural relevance, and others are weeded because no, really, a fifty-year-old book on managing your household isn’t doing anyone any favors. If you want an institution which keeps things forever, look for an archive.
Of course, if a library’s a bit hard-up, some librarians apparently begin to think that empty shelves look worse than shelves full of “Learn COBOL-85 The Burroughs Way” and “Cooking Soy with Reed and Malloy” and other detritus, hence my suggestion.
(This is massively off-topic and more than a little bit of a rant. Who says Usenet’s dead?))
Ah, the early days of the internet.
About 92(?) I can remember sending files across the country by some method that’s completely lost to me. What I can remember is how overjoyed I felt when one got to the recipient and I got a confirmation.
In the early 80s there was a book listing all sites and people on ARPANET. (I was in it.) It wasn’t all that big.
I’m not 100% sure that a file of the contents was kept publicly available online somewhere. It should have been.
For USENET, there were occasional postings on of the news.* precursor groups of most sites on it and for each a path to a major backbone site.
That was sort of the system: occasional files that collected a limited set of info that got passed around. Nothing sophisticated until Gopher (which I almost never used). Archie wasn’t as complex but was far more useful to me.