> Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.

followed by later:

> I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create your own for free here".

> I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won the SEO game.