In 1993, you could refresh the home page of Netscape (Mosaic) every day and it would mention new sites that had been added. That became unmanageable quickly, which is when two dudes from Stanford started a directory.
I've been trying to track down "What's New" for a long long time. If memory serves, there was a daily email titled "What's New on the World Wide Web" - very possibly the source for this monthly summary.
It was a fascinating way to experience the early WWW's exponential growth. It started out small, but once it began to grow, you could see it expanding faster and faster practically in real time.
At first it only took seconds to give the daily list a good once over. Over time it started taking minutes, then 20 minutes or half an hour (if things weren't too busy at work), and eventually it morphed into almost another full time job. There was just no way to keep up. Around that time they stopped sending it out.
From a historical point of view, these daily emails and monthly summaries would be a terrific resource for those interested in the early Web. It's hard to believe now that there was once a time when you could literally check out every new Web site as they came online.
If you remove commercial and edu and gov sites it's still doable today to track NEW unique websites today. There are less and less personal webpages due the instagram and fb etc
I once asked for funding from a Scottish business angel.
He confided to me that his biggest mistake in life was saying no on a phone call by a certain Tim Berners-Lee, who was looking for someone to help implement a browser for the "World Wide Web".
"Why did you reject him?" I asked. "'World Wide Web' sounded pretentious." said the man who got independently wealthy by selling a company that produced hypertext software (incl. browsers) for technical documentation running on Sun workstations...
...TBL turned to the NCSA team in the U.S. instead, and the rest is history.
One early tool in this space was Navipress (which AOL bought out and made into AOLpress) which is notable for having been used by a certain Tim Berners-Lee to write a book:
