This is somewhat second hand but I worked with someone who claimed to know the person who owned sex.com (he was trying to buy it from him at the time, and I'm trying to be deliberately un-assertive) in the mid 90s (also fair warning, this was a long time ago and I probably misremember stuff) and said he paid a ton of money in bribes to the search engines/portals back then - which was what most people assumed, but those companies insisted wasn't true, so it fit a narrative people liked.

I don't think sex.com was an expected direct hit back then - and if I'm remembering correctly, even in the later 90s, you would have had to type http://www.sex.com to get it to even load right - there wasn't a ton of convenience and most browsers relied on a heavy set of built-in bookmarks to get people into portals and search engines.

That said, I believe it was totally true that they likely paid six or seven figures for a year or longer deal to guarantee top three for a ton of porn search terms. I assume that area was allowed to be seedy in order to mitigate risk of even allowing that content to be included in the first place, and companies didn't feel bad getting money from porn sites who had a lot to throw around.

Should add that as I understood it the business model was that sex.com resold front page space to affiliates that were relevant to the search terms that led to their paid listing being listed higher for a particular keyword. That’s how they could afford to bribe/partner with portals/search engines pre-Google.

For context, squatters would often land you on some bad sites and URI syntax was unforgiving, so it just isn’t something I remember most doing. There was a general desire for simple branding on the off chance you can get it typed in or printed on a business card or in an ad, but it was not the common entry point.

Also of note: UX expectations back then didn’t trust typing into a box and seeing any result first - it really was the solid ranking of Google results that made that UX something browser vendors adopted or more cynically, that Google pushed first with partnerships then with ownership of Chrome.

Pre-2000 porn was a wild ride. You were never more that 1 click away from crashing your computer under the weight of a hundred pop ups!

And the implicit threat of your bank “outing” you via the transaction if you try to cancel. I may be misremembering but I felt like there was a good chance what I was viewing legally may end up suddenly illegal with the way online legislation was going in the late 90s, and I’m talking just like laughably soft core stuff by comparison to today, and that permeated the online porn business and kept it seedy for a long time.

No idea what you’re talking about. There was the run up to the communications decency act and obscenity prosecutions but these were far more risky for the peddlers, not the consumers (and some were prosecuted). There was the old hilarious CP80 initiative by the Mormons (with a nice tie-in to the SCO v Linux debacle) but that never had any serious legs to stand on. Meanwhile discreet billing for naughtiness predates the internet and was especially notable in the days of 900 numbers - assuring discretion was pretty well stated. Considering that child porn was essentially legal and you could walk into adult stores in broad daylight on Times Square not too long ago I think you are misremembering things or probably too young for context.

What changed is the cultural mainstream acceptance.. that something like PornHub can be a mainstream company. The market itself was alive and well pretty much the day after the movie camera left Menlo Park.

Probably an age thing I was a teen in the 90s and the internet was the first and only place any porn legislation/business was made aware to me.

> and if I'm remembering correctly, even in the later 90s, you would have had to type http://www.sex.com to get it to even load right

This wasn’t a technical requirement though, sex.com would’ve loaded just fine if it had an A record set.

Many sites didn’t do this right even large ones and often browsers if my memory serves right automatically put www and .com on any single word typed by default. That said yes, that should have worked, I just remember it not working enough that it wasn’t a normal or expected UX pattern until Google and maybe even Chrome.

Back in the early days 94/95 people quite often used to type single word domains just to see what was out there.

This is back when you could fire up mosaic and read the what's new on the internet today :-)

I remember being on Tymnet and just trying addresses via a program to see if I found anything. Most interesting thing I found was a Fed Reserve address once (did not do anything with that).

I used to work for Tymnet the TEC in the UK :-)

People used to do that on the x.25 network to find interesting sites.

there used to be (sadly not anymore) a very active forum on fuckyou.com and it was mostly populated by people that had just randomly typed it in one day.

You have too much trust in people's wholesomeness. We all know the internet is for pr0n ("...so grab your d##k and double-click...").