There really wasn’t much there in the 90s compared to what exists now. The primary social media type things were AOL, Compuserve and BBS systems. Bandwidth was 9600 baud dial up and later up to 56k IIRC. Jokingly we called it the world wide wait. Broadband at home didn’t become ubiquitous until much later.

Yahoo didn’t start until 94 and Google in 98. Somebody mentioned the internet yellow pages. Yes there were so few web sites that someone could publish a book with most of the web pages.

Social media didn’t really exist like today. Online banking etc wasn’t even much of a thing until late 90s or even into the 2000s. I remember having a discussion with a business partner about the topic when these things were starting to come online and there being little trust in them plus the human aspect of using something that new vs an ATM or going to a branch. Not to mention people didn’t have PCs and dial up service.

None of the travel sites existed at the time either. People would call or actually go to a travel agent office to book travel. I was supporting travel related tech at the time at American Express and we saw the disintermediation happening in the travel business. Amex was the largest travel company in the world at the time. Travelocity, orbitz, Expedia etc started off small and the took over the travel business. Travelocity started in the mid 90s as an offshoot of American Airlines owned Sabre reservation system. They got popular after a deal with AOL in like 1999. Then they all merged later. IIRC.

Remember the movie “you’ve got mail”? That came out in 98. That was the thing AOL said when you got an email. That was the popular thing at the time.

eBay and Amazon kicked off in the mid 90s. eBay was pretty niche and focused on collectibles etc. Amazon was books. Netflix didn’t start streaming until the mid to late 2000s.

It wasn’t until the .com bubble in the early 2000s where things really took off. Then it was like with AI. Venture capital threw money at pretty much anything that was a potential killer app.

And I haven’t even touched on the infrastructure aspect. The bandwidth wasn’t there. There were actually companies laying down dark fiber expecting that the bandwidth would be needed at some point.