Don’t over romanticize it. There were a lot of experiments, goofiness, and bad information in those days, too. It was also nearly impossible to find anything.

There was a beautiful period before Google was reverse bought by DoubleClick where you could find damn near anything. Searching was a solved problem by Inktomi and AltaVista but PageRank solved sorting search results (for a while).

Before Google AltaVista's search was pretty good at filtering out the meta tag spam that bubbled up in other search engines.

> beautiful period before Google was reverse bought by DoubleClick

That's a beautiful way to put it. I remember those days and thing is, much of Google's reputation was built during those days, a coattail they're still coasting on today.

In those days I remember you could find anything at all in just a moment. "Information snacking" was a thing, versus "being given the answer we think you want (or the one that will make us the most money)".

"Reverse bought by DoubleClick", will have to remember that..

"Reverse bought by DoubleClick" is the best description of Google's degeneration that I've ever seen.

InfoSeek was also good while it was around.

Experiments and goofiness were (part of) what made it good, and bad information is far, far worse now.

There are a lot of intelligent, interesting people who would be filtered out by the barrier of learning HTML.

There were many sites written in Word. Also intelligent people don't tend to create SPA blogs with angular and webpak.

It doesn't have to be raw HTML. Even creating a blog post with existing hosted tools is a barrier enough.