@odd @JohnPhilpin The search engine race is starting up. A lot will depend on what happens in the Google anti-trust trial in the US and EU regulatory action in Europe, because Google is so dominant they tend to suck all the life out of search.
There are a lot of search engines with their own indexes starting up but they tend to be small right now. Seirdy has a rundown which is long but the best reference I know of. Some of these search engines will fall by the wayside.
I'm trying to keep this reply short. The best of the up and coming general web search engines is Mojeek. They hit all the right buttons: privacy, their own index and algo, and uncluttered UI. Their index is probably 4th largest in size after Google, Bing and Yandex. For general daily search they tend to dig up really good lesser know websites while avoiding the same old corporate sites. You should try them.
You are right, and Molly alludes to this in her newsletter as "pathways", we need to build not only websites and blogs but also the things that connect them together and make them findable: search engines, directories, webrings, blogrolls and linkblogs, plus things we haven't thought of yet.