What are some tools or methods (whether real, theoretical, academic, or otherwise) for discovering things on the Internet, as an alternative to using a search engine. I'm not focusing on practicality here, just looking some interesting and uncommon methods for getting novel results. I suspect there's a few specific to certain types of media.<p>The methods I'm aware of are:<p>- Recommendation engines (e.g. Youtube, most social media feeds)<p>- Organic / constructed sequences of data (e.g. a playlist, or sorted lists using some measurement like price)<p>- Non-text search (e.g. search via image, sound, or geolocation)<p>- Stochastic (e.g. guessing a domain name, or entering some random text into a search engine and skipping 100 first suggestions)<p>- Automatic link traversal (e.g. a web crawler algorithm)<p>- Private sharing (e.g. sending a link in an email)<p>- Public sharing (e.g. web portal, or blogroll)<p>- Hybrid (e.g. algorithmic search engine results, news aggregators)<p>But what am I missing?
At least two of your suggestions include a search engine. What I can add are: word of mouth (things shared by people), news feed (someone shared something on FB/TW), ads (random ad on a random website), agrregators (specialized website for curating information on a certain topic), forum (get an answer from a random person in an internet form like HN or SO).
Web directories come to mind. You didn't need to know what to look for, instead you were able to browse a huge tree. Are there any modern web directories out there?
TinyGem is built exactly for this purpose.<p>It automates the process of discovery based on previous interest.<p><a href="https://tinygem.org" rel="nofollow">https://tinygem.org</a>