I was on the internet half a decade before Google became popular and I'm not even that old. It's wasn't nearly as primitive as you make it out to be. Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo!, etc, weren't as good as Google would ultimately be, but they weren't so bad as to be a different kind of thing. I got DSL around the same time (256 kbits SDSL!) Hotmail and Amazon had been around for years.
in my memories they were more registers/index than free text search engines.
and besides that, some engines seemed in comparison to the clear interface cluttered, since they also were portals.
Voting one down for describing another experience bothers me. The internet in a non-US country might have even been more different than nowaddays.
