Indie/smallweb is promising and is growing.

https://indieweb.org/

There are indieweb dedicated spaces to search for these sites. Such as https://theindex.fyi/

It's a return to a very non-corporate web experience.

The search results only have slop articles because it's increasingly difficult to find anything else. I heard that recent estimates are indicating about 50% of the content of the internet is already AI generated, and it's only going to get worse, and it's going to keep getting worse very rapidly. "Search" in the way we understand it is obsolete. I don't know what the future of content discovery for real humans is going to look like, but I'm confident it's not going to look anything like search. That's broken and it's never coming back.

On DDG, You can send feedback about each result. I dunno if it actually does any good.

• tap the three dot button next to the result
• tap “share feedback about this site”

I think you forgot to finish the question in the post title

Have you tried noai.DuckDuckGo.com? I’m curious if it gives different results.

That's funny. I do the opposite. I use the AI to do the searching and finding results of suitable quality is part of the prompt....