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There was a sense of wonder to the early Internet/Web.
I still feel it sometimes. The idea that if you just simply type the correct characters into the address bar, you'll discover the coolest thing ever, something that will make your life complete.
Today's internet is all about marketing, advertisement and surveillance.
I view this sense of wonder as part of a techno-glamor where people unquestioningly invested their life energy into automating and digitizing everything. This glamor is reflected in optimistic slogans like "Information wants to be free" and "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." This optimism is less credible now that the "powers that be" take "cyberspace" more seriously.
Your idea that if you just simply type the correct characters into the address bar, you'll discover the coolest thing ever is one of the historic visions for the Internet:
"Berners-Lee named his first hypertext system Enquire, after an old book, he found as a child in his parent's house called Enquire Within upon Everything which provided a range of household tips and advice. The book fascinated young Tim with the suggestion that it magically contained the answer to any problem in the world. With the building of the Enquire system in 1980, and then the Web ten years later, Berners-Lee has pretty much successfully dedicated his life to making that childhood book real."
I see this vision implemented in sites like Archive.org and Wikipedia.org.
Search engines weren't that good at first so you had to rely on web directories and organic links. Then Google became the best it was ever going to be and has backslided since, because there's no reason to get better. I curate my own list of websites. Pinterest is a godsend that fills in the gaps of discovery left by the Wayback Machine.