There were manual indexes for sure, but my very first experience with the web was someone excitedly showing me how they could dial in, open this web browser thing, and then... nothing, because they didn't know any websites.
We typed in a few things, but it didn't go anywhere.
I remember he called the browser a "web crawler", which was probably the search engine someone told him to use to find sites. We had no idea.
Otherwise, I have a lot of memories exploring the web by typing in words followed by TLDs and writing down the interesting ones. It was another year or two before aggregators cropped up, copying and returning the first ten results of any manual index.
I don't remember how I discovered my first web site, but it might have been from a computer magazine at the time. Later, I would use Yahoo! as my search engine, eventually switching to Google.
We typed in a few things, but it didn't go anywhere.
I remember he called the browser a "web crawler", which was probably the search engine someone told him to use to find sites. We had no idea.
Otherwise, I have a lot of memories exploring the web by typing in words followed by TLDs and writing down the interesting ones. It was another year or two before aggregators cropped up, copying and returning the first ten results of any manual index.