Discovering them is indeed hard, but it has always been hard - that's why search engines were such a gigantic improvement initially, they found more than the zero that most people had seen. But searches only ever skimmed the surface, and there's almost certainly no mechanical way to accurately identify the hidden gems - it's just straight chaos, there's a lot of good and bad and insane.

Find a small site or two, and explore their webring links, like The Good Old Days. They're still alive and healthy because it keeps getting easier to create and host them.