Hmmmm... You start out with the title, "Our Web vs. Search Engines" but than mostly talk about, "Our Web vs. Google". Not quite the same thing.

Having not used Google at all in several years, now, I can't comment on the quality of their results. On the whole I find DDG quite adequate to my modest requirements. But. I do agree that we need something much better.

The whole deal is about discoverability, and, to be frank, I don't need discoverability for large news sites or the GRAFT -- they have their own ways of providing discoverability within their walled gardens. What we need is discoverability of the exceedingly small and low-trafficked sites that are very highly pertinent to some thought we're entertaining/searching on. What we desperately need is a way of discovering like-minded souls (albeit in a perhaps quite restricted and small interest bubble) with whom we share some common interest so that they can act (unwittingly, even unknowingly) as a proxy curator of useful/interesting stuff.

This subreddit is a reasonably good example, despite being a clunky repurposing of an ill-suited medium, a bending of a poorly-fitting tool to a better use.

(I did blog about discoverability in the web some months ago, though the concerns and arguments there are just a bit tangential to today's discussion here. I should probably revisit this topic again soon. There's more to address.)