> The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized".

I wonder how much of this is still true.

Google results from a few years ago were much better than they are now. That's a combination of SEO ruining the results by Google assuming anything not hosted on a megaplatform is suspect and not showing it plus SEO ruining results by still being there in them despite that, but it happened.

If someone made a curated list of interesting small sites by category, it would be a lot more useful now than it was before that happened.

I have to wonder if the degrading of search results came solely from SEO dark patterns that do more harm than good, or if Google actively believed that small sites were becoming less relevant as social took off. Objectively, looking at PageRank might convince them that Facebook and Twitter were where people were spending time, but that particular firehose is so big it can - and eventually did - dilute nearly all the other relevant results.

Pipe dream: If someone wishes hard enough, maybe we can convince the Apollo guys to leave Yahoo alone so it can return to its roots as (surprise!) a directory.

It was the rise of tagging and folksonomies (now known as #hashtags) which made the blogs halfway usable. Because they allow you to search within the archived posts for the sub-topic you're interested in.

But wasn't the raison d'etre of Google links to other sites, thereby giving some sense of how popular a given page was?

This helps individual sites, but says little about why the overall quality of links has nosedived. Who they link to continues to matter, except that now there is so much noise this is very difficult to get right unless you are extremely clever, lucky, or probably both.