You should see what searching was like on AltaVista. You'd have to scroll past dozens of posts of random numbers and letters to find anything legible. Click through and your computer would emit a cacophony of bell sounds and pour out screens of random nonsense and then freeze permanently. You had to rely on links and web-rings to navigate with any degree of success.
And that in itself was a massive improvement on what was available before.
because a printer that was $800 in 1995 is now $49