Bring back webrings, "favorite links" pages and the ODP/DMOZ. Good niche forums (both on Usenet and elsewhere) tended to gather FAQs and information pages that would ultimately aid discovery. That whole dynamic is quite dead these days.
Webrings were great but you still need search as a starting point. Now we've got all this spam out there which essentially creates fake webrings (private blog networks [1]) as a form of black hat SEO.
