[gregmac]

When I was first using the web, it was largely via Yahoo! directory [1] results. Most of the interesting sites were people's personal sites (with lots of URLs like something.edu/~user), and most people maintained a list of links to other sites they found interesting -- chances are if you liked their site, you'd like most of the ones they linked to as well.

Pretty much all that stuff is just gone now.

The closest thing I do like this today is probably Twitter: follow someone interesting, and you'll start discovering people/projects/sites/etc they find interesting. Similarly, HN/Reddit are maybe the closest thing to randomly browsing the "directory", but otherwise everything is via organic search results for a specific topic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory