> I don't know that Google was ever the thing to find them. Various curated lists and word-of-mouth were how they spread.
There was a period in the mid-'90s at least when you could find really interesting personal pages by punching any given topic into your search engine of choice. It may actually have been petering out by the time Google arrived in '98, though.
google.com/search?q=human+echolocation brings up a ton of related stuff.
The thing is "what do you type into the search engine." I, for one, would never think to type in any of probably tens of thousands of topics that, having seen, I think are awesome.
There was a period in the mid-'90s at least when you could find really interesting personal pages by punching any given topic into your search engine of choice. It may actually have been petering out by the time Google arrived in '98, though.