>Anything academic, search on specific websites or Google Scholar. Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit. Try to join like-minded communities where you can ask expert questions, and research new things in your field
This is much more like what Ye Olde Webbe was like. Sites competed to build communities that were repositories of information. Things like Reddit tried to build a generic silo so that they could silo information there, which I think is a bad thing long-term.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is sites just give up on doing their own search. Not surprising, as search is a hard problem, but it plays merry hell with the democratization of the Internet to foist the problem off onto Big Corporation Inc. to do the heavy lifting.
A related problem is that many sites simply don't have what could be called a "webmaster" anymore. Everything is contracted out, or part of a subscription service, or otherwise disconnected from the owner of the site having full control. If you're a small business that sells locally produced products, you're never going to appear in Google or Amazon searches, even if you have an Amazon store. You can't afford a full-time webmaster just for your site, and all of the various platforms, like Wordpress/Shopify/etc, deal in such volume that these small businesses will be largely ignored.
The ISV model for products like AutoCAD is possibly a good route. A team of well-versed engineers and designers can build things, but you need a direct customer representative to get at the juicy meat of what the end-user needs. Apply this sort of model to search, and you can aggregate over larger swathes of customers.