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.

It worked because the web was much smaller.

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.