CAN BE as traumatic on the Web as it is in real life. In real life you ask someone for directions. On the Web it's as simple as finding your way to a search engine.
Search engines come in two flavours.
There's the good old crawler or spider who creeps through the Internet picking out words and adding them to a central database. The whole task is automated and each site can be listed by any number of keywords. Engines like Altavista and Anzwers use these methods. Then there's the pure directory that has been lovingly and painstakingly built by humans. How to search is pretty universal.