I remember the days pre-google when Yahoo was king. And most sites were filed under a topic/category. That was the default way to find a group of somethings. It's also a little suggestive and explorative, whereas keyword based search engines relied more on you being more specific. Crowd stoked search results and AI have bridged the divide these days. What the author failed to mention was web rings. Basically authors with like minded material would link to each other. So once you found something you could hop to something else and bypass the search engine. These days you are almost crippled without the search hand.