As someone who grew up with Google and is now trying to get into niche interests, I have basically no idea how to do the real, old fashioned leg work. I still don't know exactly how much of this is Google's fault, because it remains great for providing information on a lot of more broadly accessible subjects.
in the old times there were _a lot_ of search engines, and they even had directories, you could find lots of interesting websites and communities linked between them, no optimization or ads, you'd also use usenet to talk about topics (like today's reddit and digg)
plenty of creators
This. A thousand times, this.
I really feel is the unfortunate consequences of our short attention span and everyone marketing towards an insanely short attention span is you get the firehose of information, but zero depth to any of it.
If I want to dig; really dig into a subject, 99% of what Google pukes at me is not helpful at all. A few times lately, I've ran into something I've found through Google, but trying to dig any deeper is futile. I've had to go down to the local library and start digging through news clippings, books and magazines. Actual, real old fashioned leg work.
I've come to feel like the internet has no depth anymore, everything is just enough to satisfy a .001 second attention span. Sad when you really stop and think about it.