alternatively, the bookmarks/links page to mine has a hefty list of artist-focused sites (http://kradeelav.com/link.html), and the yesterweb webring has enough to get you going in the fun quirky webrings - https://links.yesterweb.org/
Google and Bing (and hence DDG etc) are no longer a search engines, they're "information the powers that be permit you to have" engines. Forums, blogs, and small independent websites have disappeared from indexes. Large walled garden platforms like Facebook are impossible to query.
I certainly notice this too. I remember searching for technical queries and would find many (not SEOsplurge) blog posts or random forums where the question is discussed. Now it is just the same stackoverflow answer replicated across multiple content farms.
Peculiarly, I have found the more 'genuine' websites by using image search. Perhaps because more things fit into a grid, and I can usually gauge whether the website is genuine or a botfarm from the images its author chose.
If I search "presstv", the .com site of which was literally seized by the US govt, I get their unseizable .ir site as the first result. No scary warnings, no fluff.
If I search "rt", I get RT site as the first result.
Similarly for smaller sites that have caught flak or been banned for opposing US government narratives (SCF, CN, GZ, etc).
Ironically, it's "open" platforms like Wikipedia that have the lowest tolerance for political dissent. Twitter, Facebook are quite compromised as well.
From what I can tell, DDG said they were going to downrank known propaganda sites, which meant that, in practice, dissenting results would also appear.
Then, the pro-Russian-propaganda outlets got upset and started complaining about free speech. (As though exclusively showing sites from one hostile foreign government would be aligned with the intent of the 1st amendment!)
Wish there was something like Read Something Interesting (http://readsomethinginteresting.com/) but with a search index, where you could search only the blogosphere.
.....what? What forums have dissapeared from Google? I get and search forum results all the time. This is not including of course the forums that have gone private or purposely delisted themselves
I can't surface them at all for non-programming sites. Occasionally automotive, but it's still mostly AI generated made for adsense junk. I can use site: filters on sites I know about, but I can't find anything on a page I don't know that way. Your filter bubble may be different.
Discovery has become the one thing that our social networking overlords do and focus on. But we learned about new things before them just by talking with our peers. I think the IndieWeb's concept of a Social Reader[1] can do a great job of filling this need. If you like or comment on something in your feed-reader, it becomes a post on your outgoing feed that people can see. This lets any individual or site act as a source for curated content.
I get Thinking About Things, which points me to interesting sites on the internet (https://thinking-about-things.com/). Another great one is Findka essays (https://essays.findka.com/). Would love to hear any other recommendations.