Yeah I also don't really remember this extra-internet thing. Perhaps the author is talking about a very early period of the internet (which I don't know)? What I rememeber was that before 'real' search it was indeed what you describe, just endless chain of links of one site to the other and sites aggregating links.
Also, I remember web rings being helpful for content discovery in the mid-late 1990s. Different authors for a given subject would cooperate with each other and put something like a banner add at the bottom of their page with "next" and "previous" links, so you'd get a doubly-linked list circular ring of cooperating sites for a given subject.
