I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
There is still lots of cool stuff on the Internet. The key to finding it is to avoid search engines that have a financial incentives to point you at advertisers instead.
This is that “liberal news media” that MAGAs keep yammering on about. The one that’s owned by six corporations.