[Sharlin]

On the contrary, the Web, being a hypertext system, was definitely always about discovering content. If you found an interesting website, it would typically link to other interesting sites. There used to be ways to systematize these ad-hoc linkings, such as Web rings. And the first attempts to catalogue and categorize the contents of the (then tiny) Web were in the form of human-curated directories à la Yahoo. It’s just that in just a few years it became apparent that this approach could not scale, and search engines based on automatic crawlers became the norm – but again, critically, these too are of course fundamentally dependent on the Web’s discoverability by following hyperlinks!

[kevincox]

This works well for random exportation, or exportation of related topics, however it is basically useless for finding information on a new topic as you don't have anywhere to start.

The only way would be to keep finding links like Wiki Game and hoping to get closer to the intended target. Luckily there are huge robots who have done this for you and can tell you which links lead to your destination.

[stinos]

Yeah I also don't really remember this extra-internet thing. Perhaps the author is talking about a very early period of the internet (which I don't know)? What I rememeber was that before 'real' search it was indeed what you describe, just endless chain of links of one site to the other and sites aggregating links.

[KMag]

Also, I remember web rings being helpful for content discovery in the mid-late 1990s. Different authors for a given subject would cooperate with each other and put something like a banner add at the bottom of their page with "next" and "previous" links, so you'd get a doubly-linked list circular ring of cooperating sites for a given subject.