Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.
I was briefly going to write "I'm surprised that DMOZ[1] still exists" but it says "Copyright 2017 AOL" at the bottom so maybe it doesn't.
Edit: ...and using the search box results in a 404 so I guess it's really dead huh.
Edit 2: Apparently this is the successor! https://curlie.org/en
[1]: https://dmoz-odp.org
It's not a bad idea to have a curated dataset of information. But clearly there are much better ways to navigate said information, which would include search, but also dynamic filters, predictive text, sorting algorithms, context awareness, etc. All of which... is built into modern search engines.
So perhaps what we really want is a Wikipedia/OpenStreetMaps of curated, indexed, semantic content/links, that anyone can consume and write their own search interface for. Basically, an open data warehouse of website information.
Who will pay for its creation, maintenance and hosting? Who will judge ranking, disputes, hacks?
Who will have an eye on discrimination issues? Whose jurisdiction will be relevant (think GDPR or the Australian press "gag order" law in the case of that cleric accused of fondling kids)?
Who will take care that the humans who will get exposed to anything from generic violence over vore/gore to pedo content get access to counseling and be fairly paid? Facebook, the world's largest website, hasn't figured out that one ffs.
These questions are ... relatively easy to bypass with an automated engine (all issues can be explained away as "it was the algorithm" and IT-illiterate judges and politicians will accept this), but as soon as you have meaningful human interaction in the loop, you suddenly have humans that can be targeted by lawsuits, police measures and other abuse.
In theory, you could have a curated directory whose hosting works like ThePirateBay, and whose maintainership is entirely anonymous authors operating over Tor (even though the directory itself holds nothing the average person would find all that objectionable.)
Of course, there's no business model in that...
A site that wants to be compliant to the law in the major jurisdictions (US, EU) can't operate that way, not with NetzDG, copyright and other laws in play.