Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, AOL Keywords were basically the shortcuts to the internet before Google took over. Instead of typing long URLs, you’d just punch in a simple word or phrase—like “Nike” or “WB”—into AOL’s search bar, and boom, you were on that brand’s page inside AOL’s walled garden. Keywords launched around the mid-’90s and peaked with AOL 4.0 in 1998 and 5.0 in 1999, when the service had over 20 million U.S. users dialing in at 56k speeds. It was marketing gold at the time, with TV and magazine ads ending with “AOL Keyword: [Brand],” but once broadband and Google search took off in the early 2000s, the system quietly faded out.