system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How did people search for web pages before the first search engine was made?
gpt
We didn't. 

First, remember that the World Wide Web (and the commercial Internet) are fairly *recent* additions to the internet as a whole. And when the WWW got started, you'd just go to the main website for whatever school or other entity you were looking for. They usually had indexes of what was on them. For example, if students and faculty had personal webpages, there was usually a directory.

So there was that, plus word of mouth (or text of usenet post). 

Eventually we got index sites. You'd go on there and you could go by category - kind of like a yellow pages. If you wanted to be on an index site, you had to actually go and submit your page/site. Then they added a search function to those.

Eventually there was enough interconnectivity to facilitate running a program that could go out there and find and index new websites, and the modern search engine was born.