When I first got on the internet, there was Altavista and there were some web directories. Alstavista was nice, but the directories were much more organized and I saw them as the future, so much that at one point I even maintained some categories at dmoz. When Google took off to the point that non-tech people I knew recognized it and dmoz closed down, I was pretty disappointed even though Google was clearly the future by then (And it was better at actually finding stuff back then. Nowadays it's an echo chamber and worse, it just feeds you anything, I don't think I've seen a "no results found" page in a decade.).