The old internet is still there. It hasn‘t gone away; it‘s just undiscoverable with ad-based search. The more slop there is, the more necessary it is to have good search engines.

If you haven't tried Marginalia Search yet, do so. It's a small web search.

Recently, I set up a fresh system on a laptop. Ahahahaaa, how utterly crap Google search results now are! It fills me with some stress and disgust to use that. Now one of the first things I do, right after emergency using duckduckgo to search for uBlock Origin and NoScript, is to get Kagi search installed as default search. Then I can continue setting things up more calmly.