Porn, definitley. But at the time I was still in my parents’ house and using their computer, so I tried to figure out discreet ways to search for it - it all started by browsing medical websites for pictures of self-breast exams.
My discretion went out the window little by little with time.
It was 1995. I was 17. The search engine was WebCrawler. The browser was Netscape. I typed in Blur. I went to their homepage, which back then was simple html. I think I wet my pants.
The second thing was porn. I know I wet my pants.
The whole concept was amazing to me, and I remember each time I’d look up something new, my hands were literally trembling. I couldn’t believe the amount of information suddenly available to me, and I couldn’t get it all fast enough. So many people out there I could communicate with, people I had never known existed before. T’was neat.
Lyrics to a song by the Offspring. 1996 or 1997.
Before we got the Intarweb, though, my dad ran a BBS. I did a LOT of BBSing in my younger days. Mostly to play games like Legend of the Red Dragon - the only online game I’ve ever really liked.
~Tasha
The first thing I looked up was www.ford.com to look at the info on Mustangs around 1996 on a public library computer. The next site I went to was a football page, NFL.com I think. A friend had given me a photocopied page from a magazine of cool websites to check out.
A slight hi-jack, but I seemed to recall going to a friend’s apartment around 1988 and he was playing a WW I aerial dogfighting game- I recall it being like a simple first person shooter kinda thing. I was amazed when he claimed to be playing against an opponent at another university. I couldn’t believe it- was he BS-ing me?
You mean the ‘real’ internet? That probably would have been through a straight dial-up connection to the Edmonton Freenet, most likely using lynx/tin to access a newsgroup.
I could be flippant and say porn, but it was more likely a game cheat, or how to get around the file download restrictions they had in place at the time.
When we got a dial-up account (ISP’s floppy would have come with Winsock and a way early Netscape, along with a newsreader and perhaps gopher client), it would probably have been something to show the parents what an awesome thing it was they were paying for. 
First webpage I saw showed several topologic matrices for the same substance (with different symmetry constraints) and the pictures for the resulting calculations.
What? I was in grad school for Quantum Chemistry.
That is a really good question…for me it is all kind of a blur. I went from discovering local BBS’s which I found in some local rags and dialed into (on my wonderful green screen monitor) and then - geez, I have no idea when I found the Internet.
I do remember being one of the first of my friends to find Google and immediately started using it as my homepage - mainly because it loaded fast, without the garbage that took so long to load on my pathetic little modem at the time.
That too brings back horrible memories of waiting for what seemed like ages to download a picture or something, only to find out it was not at all what you were looking for. I can seriously recall clicking on a page, then going to get something to drink, hit the restroom, check out what was on television and then come back to see how that download was going - and of course, half way through the download it failed or whatever.
Hard to believe how fast everything has changed in such a relatively short time.
Here, this website.
I was first mucking about looking stuff up in late 1998, via library terminals. Hard to recall what, though. Something that was taking up all of my half-hour paid time I’d forked out for … might have been the New Zealand Herald, or genealogy sites. Tentatively clicking, back-clicking, getting used to using the new-fangled technology. When I finally got my own internet-capable PC in July 2000, after all that foraging, I locked myself in for the weekend and went nuts. No more need to keep an eye on the watch. 
Most likely, either “dogs” or “horses”
I was little and, having been told that I could type in anything I wanted and get information about it and pictures, one of those two things would have been it.
The first website I visited was probably PBS.com. They said they had games for kids, but it was all stuff you had to print out and play, like, for real. I felt cheated.
Hey, I was practically born a Trek geek; hand me a tool to look up anything in the world at age 10, and what do you THINK I’m gonna do with it? 
I will never forget the first thing I looked up.
My brother was showing me his nifty new computer back in '95. Before then I don’t think I’d ever touched one. I didn’t even know what the internet was.
He showed me how I could look up anything in the world. He typed in our hometown and up came hundreds of sites. I was so impressed!
Then he got out of the chair and turned the keyboard over to me.
I typed the first thing that came into my head.
Cheese.
I don’t really remember… probably some kind of boring information about my university or college. 
I was actually on the 'net for a little while before it started to sink in how seriously cool it was. (This was when I’d first gotten to York.)
“Alien autopsy”.
1994, at Cyberia, London’s first internet café. My brother was a “cyber-host”, aka “waiter”, and got me some free hours. We used Webcrawler, I remember that too.
Ben Folds Five lyrics, some time in 1995. I went to my brother’s friend’s house and they showed me the Internet. I printed out the lyrics - I bet I still have them. Pretty sure I used Yahoo to search.
Before that I’d been BBSing for a while - thanks to the same brother’s friend. I had printed out all of the available Pearl Jam lyrics from Usenet, too. Via the CWRU servers
It would’ve been 1995, I think. The earliest thing I remember looking up independently was the rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc newgroup. I can remember a few months later installing Netscape 2.02 and marvelling at animated gifs.
I had a roommate who ran a BBS, so I was introduced to online life quite early on, but only as an observer, and not as a participant until I convinced my mother to get a computer, and I started using hers every so often. Eventually, late 96, I got my own computer and internet, and that’s when the porn searching began in earnest.
I can remember the introduction of Windows 95, so I must’ve been aware of Windows 3.1, though a lot of my memories are a blur and hard to pin down with a date.
Usenet, around '94, I think, and it was rec.arts.tolkien and alt.fan.pratchett that I found within 30 seconds of being online.
The first thing I looked up on Netscape, in '95, was a geochemistry paper at some US university - something on the tracing of cassiterite in surface soils or somesuch.
The official X-Files website.
SNES codes, porn, and the Straight Dope.
I remember that the addition of the WWW on AOL merited a mere jump from 2.6 to 2.7.
Urban Legends. I found Snopes and it was still small enough that I read the whole thing in one sitting.