Everyone was still too cautious to type their credit card in or something. There was nothing to monetize. So, yeah, every website was someone's small passion project, with handwritten HTML.

State of the art for discovery used to be browsing a (manually?) curated directory on Yahoo. Google appeared and was a mind-blowing sea change. That's probably the peak, Google's inception up until jackass SEO marketers appeared. During that window, search worked fantastically over content that was fun to read.