I am looking for something that would filter for sites that rarely post but have good content. The number one problem with most of these systems is that everything favours frequent posting. Even if I do it manually, I cannot keep the tabs over many rarely posting sites - this is an obvious example of a problem that we delegate to computers. Favouring frequent posters creates incentives to do that even if quality worsens.
The perverse thing here is that's exactly the opposite of how we've traditionally valued resources!
I'd be fascinated on the economics of this from Google's perspective: specifically the unit economics on generating updated-once-a-year results to queried-once-in-a-million searches.
Tl;dr: I feel like the long-tail web (90s) was better, but economics pushed high-update-frequency more-centralized results.