In the early days of the Internet, we didn’t find new sites by searching through Google or other engines, we tended to follow the ‘links’ page that websites used to include to point you to similar sites and those that the web author thought were interesting to their audience. You could spend time going from one links page to another and building a collection of interesting websites.

These days we’ve become both lazy and rely on commercial search engines to find information. Problem is, they are commercial. Key sites are always going to appear on the first couple of search engine result pages. Important free and individual sites may be pages in to the results.

Another option is to use a site such as StumpleUpon to help you find interesting new sites, although you can get sick of the various suggestions that are of no interest whatsoever.

SimilarWeb is a plugin for Firefox that enables you to quickly see other very similar websites to the website you enter in to your browser. As an example, head to similarsites.com and you’ll find that the add-on suggests StumbleUpon and other sites. The only downside is that the add-on chooses to add a lame ‘SimilarWeb’ logo to the top of the results in a bar, down the side of your browser.