No. Unless you count the non-existence of the DMCA which essentially resulted in the creation of an accessible and accurate internet index becoming de facto illegal, and the fact webmasters and other netizens actually operated with enough restraint to not have crawlers, web spiders, and what few scrapers there were hammering sites to the point of ruin in the search for moar data.

It was an index that could be searched via Boolean operator, with a few other more complex operators attached. The biggest problem came in once SEO became a thing and started reverse engineering the relevance algorithms, completely poisoning the index.