Browsing before browser wars

In the early days of the web, when we used to surf the information superhighway using Lynx (before Netscape burst onto the scene and allowed us to view images inline instead of saving them locally to look at them in Paint ten minutes later), getting to interesing content wasn't that hard. After all, there wasn't very much content out there and what there was seemed fresh and new in its presentation -- those animated under construction and mailbox GIFs aside -- and exotic in its location.
Moreover, we knew what was out there. A few thousand active webmasters would maintain sites based on small subject areas that would link to content on other sites; yes, these were portals way before JSR-170 and other complications. These index sites were in turn submitted by their maintainers to Yahoo! which classified them according to their owners' preference, so that with the paucity of categories and sites listed under each (I created categories for French comedy, French 17th century theatre -- which wasn't Renaissance despite Yahoo's protestations -- and water polo history) it was a simple matter to browse through the dozen or so sites under each subject area. You could just go to Yahoo, find a category, and surf.
Those days were doomed once the lofty-peaked logo of AltaVista emerged on our browsers' collective horizon. This new search technology allowed you to find content regardless of context quickly and, while Yahoo struggled to keep pace both with its competitor and its growing queue of submissions, AltaVista's acquisitive approch enabled it to secure the bulk of search traffic and change browsing gambits. Thus it came to pass that we interacted with sites according to keyword rather than concept, paving the way for the millions of browsers that now have Google (or indeed MSN or AOL) as their homepage. However (now that I've grounded but hopefully not interred you in my perception of web history) at least one community of web users is reverting to a subject-based browsing model, effectively suggesting which sites would merit a pair of Yahoo's long since forgotten "hot" sunglasses.
Stumble Upon provides a toolbar for IE and Firefox that takes users to a random site on a subject they have expressed an interest in, based on a selection suggested by other users. I strongly recommend it: it's surfing how it used to be.