Pay to play was the problem there. I had the highest ranking joke page on webcrawler for a stint, but Yahoo wanted $500 to put me on top. My 15 year old self was not interested.

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

It worked because the web was much smaller.