See I actually WISH that was my experience with the internet but that only really applied to people who didn't have it then had it, much like say a youth today who didn't grow up with a computer but had heard about them from others then suddenly was given one.
Here was my experience with "the internet"--story time:
In 6th grade (1992) Apple made a pitch to the local school systems saying if they got rid of all of their PCs they'd donate a boatload of apple IIe's, enough to put several in each classroom. The school system thought it was a good deal, after my grandfather drove me around to 8 different schools grabbing me ~50 free PCs I did too. Net result I spent most of 6th grade throwing together pcs, learning networking and linux, bbs systems, etc. Note: I had plenty of modems but no "Compuserve" or "Prodigy" or whatever (AOL didn't really exist yet). To me a modem was largely something for directly calling a local BBS that you could essentially "pirate" compuserve's newsgroups or whatever from...
Fast forward 6 months and a brand new technology was introduced on ORNLs mainframes (one of which I had shell on) called TIA(the internet adapter) which let you essentially turn dialing into a local mainframe into "an internet connection" as we understand it today. Except it really wasn't "the internet" today of all.
First of all, not only was there "no google" the very concept of what we now think of as a "search engine" didn't exist! "Web crawlers" weren't introduced (by webcrawler.com... go figure) until 1995. Instead, largely, their were "portals" and "listings". You went to gopher and found a portal for your city, then went to the restaurant portal within that city and whoever had listed their place would show up and whoever hadn't wouldn't. This is fine if you're looking for a pizza I suppose but lousy for finding out "when was the modern pizza invented" or "what ingredients were on a classic pizza".
Anyways this has become quite long so I guess my point is that, from my perspective at least, when people are first learning the internet they feel that it's this magical place where you can learn/do anything if you just have the know-how and it is their technical limitations that keep them from finding something where the experience in the early days was largely that "the internet" (which it was almost never called btw) was just an extended family of super-nerds using a combination of mailing lists and web portals to emulate quite accurately I must say what reddit basically is today and griping quietly about (basically) what a hack-job the whole thing was and how it would be so much better if someone could just ______.