People mentioning other people, friends telling you about stuff.

For me, personally, it’s been a long time since Google pointed me to new platforms or new writers. It is dominated by big outlets and seo articles now, and good mostly for finding basic factual info - not for finding individual writers or nlogs any more

That sounds like Twitter, but without the keys and signing.

But search on twitter is absolute garbage.

Oh, the golden age of search... did we appreciate it enough while it lasted? I surely didn't.

I assume just like you'd find Paul Graham today, but by specifying him as trustworthy all his content would be ranked higher in searches.

Cause Paul tagged his trusted people. Sounds like everybody knows everybody around two corners like on LinkedIn. This could create another form of SEO Tag Spam.

yey ID based internet ;)

You can always start with a clean slate and get the current PageRanked results of course.