Honestly, yeah, my first thought is that I miss the Google and YouTube from 15 years ago

A bit of the Google that was like that persists as the 'web' subsearch. The site at https://udm14.com/ exists purely as a frontend to that search. It's not exactly like the old Google, it's still too ready to throw Youtube videos at the top of the results, but it's still much easier to find interesting websites that way than Google's default search.

It's crazy that there is a whole generation of people who will never know how good google was at some point. You could find all the obscure shit. How often i just googled a serial number or some weird machinery to find parts, and people thought that i'm some sort of wizard. Try that now