No sarcasm, I think it's true. I'm talking about the original search engine, not what they've done to it since. They've done amazing things to it since and it's obviously turned into an arms race, but we all build much more complex software today than we did 20 years ago.

Better tools, better practices, better understanding of what works and what doesn't, better resources online.

Even simple things like most people these days understand how HTTP actually works, back then you'd be lucky to find people who even understood basic HTML.

Did you use Google back then? It wasn't actually that great, you might have to do a bunch of searches, try excluding words, just to get some vaguely good results. It was a lot better than the rest though.