In the early web (circa 2000 and earlier), search engines were awful so most people used human-curated directories (Yahoo, DMOZ), web rings or links pages to fi

In the early web (circa 2000 and earlier), search engines were awful so most people used human-curated directories (Yahoo, DMOZ), web rings or links pages to find new web sites to visit. The web rings were organized groups of web sites that linked to each other in a circular fashion and it was normal for every web site to have a links page that linked to similar sites much like you'd still see on a college professor's personal site. I'm familiar with this because I heavily used the web of that era as a pre-teen. Since search engines are now flooded with automatically generated trash, the solution is probably a return to the old ways this problem was solved before Google.