My own recollection of the pre-Google era of Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc was that search engines already accounted for the lion's share of content discovery online. My gut feeling would be that it might have been even larger back then than it is now, considering the role that social media play nowadays.
What it was like before then I can't say as I'm not that old, but I imagine that URLs would have been made known through the usenet, irc and so on, which were also more multicast/broadcast in nature than word-of-mouth in the sense of people who actually personally know each other in meatspace communicating point-to-point.
What it was like before then I can't say as I'm not that old, but I imagine that URLs would have been made known through the usenet, irc and so on, which were also more multicast/broadcast in nature than word-of-mouth in the sense of people who actually personally know each other in meatspace communicating point-to-point.