I think the 'Age of PageRank' could be revived. A few years ago I had this idea about a decentralized, distributed, independent, public, universal, dynamic and searchable directory of websites; I wrote a toy specification document for it [1] - which I had forgotten until reading this discussion - and if I'm not mistaken, implementing it could be a few days project for a regular dev.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Cipr/specification