Before Google was created (and for a few years after) you would have used other search engines/portals. In my experience, the most common back then were (in no particular order): Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, Altavista, Webcrawler.

Also, internet service providers usually provided their own portal, to support less-experienced users.

As a company/site, you depended on - adding yourself - to the lists on these portals to be discovered by customers.

As a user, you depended on the listings on these portals/search engines to discover sites/companies you were interested in.