A lot of other things have changed since then, so the difference in tone you are noticing might not have much to do with search engines. In 1996 there were only about 16 million people on the internet, and usage obviously skewed towards the more technical nerdy crowd. Now there are 4,383 million people on the internet. Which is about 57% of everyone.
I see this a lot on HN. People forget that a lot of things in the early days of the Internet only worked because there were so few people on the Internet.
If you were rich and had a T1 in your home in the days everyone was on dialup, sure you could host a website yourself. But these days, even if you're one of the lucky residents on a gigabit symmetrical connection, there's a limit to how much you can serve. Self-hosting isn't an option unless your website is a niche.
