There were indeed search engines pre-google, the "big four" and a host of smaller ones.

There were also "directories" that were very useful. Yahoo's at least is still around. If you wanted to find a bunch of sites on a specific topic you'd use those. But a lot of the time you would follow links between sites - most sites would have a dedicated page of "links to other sites that we think are good/related". A sibling has mentioned webrings which were also a thing.

I never used AOL, but it had a "keyword" system that worked a bit like twitter - you could look up a keyword and see a bunch of sites that claimed to be related to it.

And it was a lot more common to type in a URL that you found offline - books came with their homepage on (they probably still do).