I’m (slowly) working on an old-school manually-curated index of websites that I think have that “soul” of the old web. Many aren’t old, and lots are even using the latest in web technologies, but the common theme is “someone put time and effort into hand crafting this website for no other reason than because they were passionate about it”.

I really do think there’s a gap in the modern web for discovering stuff like this. Google only wants to show you what social networks and major entities have for your query, and SEO spam buries everything else.