altavista - best pre-Google search engine. It would probably be the best post-Google-enshittification search engine today too.

geocities

Not any one site, but a class of pages you might call the "tilde sites." That is, personal sites served from the user's home directory on a multiuser host. Like: http://cs.example.edu/~user/

I don't know, but none of my AOL keywords work anymore.

GeoCities

The world's first webpage is still up.

https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Looks a lot like a typical gopher node (or, today, gemini node). Hierarchical tree, link, brief description attached to each link.

There was a japanese website where you would type peoples names and it would morph the characters into swords, dicks, and anuses. You could type two names and it'll turn one into a weenie and the other into a butt and see how well they fit together.

It was amusing. I can't remember the name. I am sadness.

Not a site but a feature: web rings

You're on a site about radio control toys, at the bottom is a ring control go to a thematically related site, maybe find your way around the ring to it's start

Not from the 90s but around 2007 I think. There was a private torrent tracker called something like UGS-torrents. Where UGS stood for underground sounds. Pretty sure it was based in the UK and it focused on electronic and club music singles being released at the time from a bunch of smaller producers. Unique stuff I'm not even sure what to call the genre to be able to look for it today but a lot of it was adjacent to drum and bass, 2-step, or break beats. Super active forums with members making and sharing DJ mixes. I've been out of the scene for quite a while now but the few times I've searched for any mention of this place I've found nothing. If anyone has any information I'd appreciate it if you could share.

Netscape, I guess

Fry's Electronics, too, tho technically the memorial site is still up

As the first boom turned to bust, fuckedcompany.com was a snarky look behind the curtain of the dumb we all built.

thecreepingeyemorgue.com

That site was later renamed to the more familiar rotten.com, which also apparently no longer exists.

I miss Geocities and bolt.com. Apparently it's a shitty app now, but it was once glorious.

Astroatlas. Was my first glimpse into "you can make your own website" and blew my damn mind.

*.demon.co.uk and *.xs4all.nl, both now defunct european ISPs that made it easy for people to host pages. IIRC the future sound of London had their page at demon, and xs4all hosted all kinds of nerdy/OSS pages, and some weird music, too ;) Oh, and there was *.free.fr, too

Some early shock/gore site discussion below, spoilered in case you don't wanna read about such things.

When the internet was first introduced to me in around '97 or so, in IT class in high school, the only thing I really did was look for URLs on products around the class or in my pockets. For example, Pepsi had a website, Peperami had one too. I also created an email account on Hotmail.com, and I believe we did some chat room stuff in IRC or ICQ or one of those things.

One day during a lunch break at the same school, I looked up porn and actually found some, although I have no memory of what the site was called. I got scared though, and closed the browser as soon as I saw nudey ladies. I'm sure the teacher checked the browsing history (something I had no idea about back then) and saw what I was looking at, but he never said anything to me about it. Legend 🫡

gossip.babeleweb.net

Let's just say that an archive of Penthouse Pet pictorials in the age before internet video was an absolute goldmine for 12-year-old me.

stickslaughter

flash animations of stick figure combat

Two games, likely flash, but possibly just JavaScript and stuff. I remember accessing through dedicated webpages.

One was a puzzle game that had a planet and a bunch of items to place on it. The game let you place each item only once, and the items would have different interactions depending on which order you placed them in. So if you use the seed before the water, it would grow. But if you placed the fan down before the water, it would create a storm which would make the seed grow even more...or something like that.

The other one was a game where you leveled up like an RPG with stat points, but the stats were just how long or wide your sword is. Power too, I think. Your character followed your mouse cursor, and clicking would swing the sword. You could choose different areas where different monsters with different stats would appear, chasing you, and you could kill them for more experience. Almost a proto Vampire Saviours, I guess

sixdegrees.com

It was one of the very first social networking sites. I met my partner through there in a random chat room.
It was based on the six degrees of separation thing. You could see from any user if you were connected and through how many degrees.
I don’t remember much anymore, besides it being a place where you could meet people.

There was a fan site dedicated to Shirley Manson and Billy Joe Armstrong. It wasn't Green Day and Garbage it was just them Im a huge Garbage fan and at the time it was one of the coolest things to stumble upon at 12 years old. Super niche and clearly just someone who was obsessed. Loved that site. No idea how i found it lol

Flashjokeoftheday.com - flash is dead. Has been for a while. The little jokes were great.

My first website on "Spree.net". Hahaha.

excite is gone and it was better than yahoo. its big mistake was yahoo added tabs and it did not so your page got bigger and bigger and longer to resolve.

Suck.com (political and social commentary) and Plastic.com (an early, richly featured forum site) were both really good

https://warehouse23.com/basement by Steve Jackson Games was hours of fun back when it existed. Think of the giant warehouse at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (SyFy also ripped the idea off in the show 'Warehouse 13').

mrcranky.com was a pretty good early message board that is utterly gone now. I've barely even thought about it for like 20 years, but it was fun while it lasted.

The original surreal Direct Debit website. tbf it's on archive.org although not completely intact but "no trace of" isn't entirely accurate (although I suspect that's true of most 1990s websites)

I remember a blog from some people in the US called chickenlegs I think

Well I was about 14

I remember sexhungryjoes.com

Probably killed every computer we had back then with viruses

Hallpass.com Now godaddy wants $250k for it.

I remember when they got rid of the porn (like every website, it was their downfall)

GaboCorp. It was, at its release, amazing.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/gabocorp-1997