I miss webrings. I don't think that search getting better killed them (they are useful for reasons unrelated to the state of search), but when personal and hobbyist websites started vanishing, webrings went with them.

Ironically, once search got better for the users, there was no further need to build comprehensive sites with great content in the hopes of getting added to webrings and directories. All sites need to worry about after were getting backlinks.

After that, sites also stop linking to each other.

Webrings were a great, essentially curated list of sites the authors of sites you liked thought you might also enjoy or find useful. I miss them, too.

yah, come to think of it in the curated space, this reminds me of that awesome X family of github pages. Looks like someone compiled a bunch of them here https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome#databases. I have found those to be highly valuable treasure troves pregnant with rich and relevant information.

Add some context, expanding on what wolpoli mentioned,

Sure search engines got better, and then they got worse..

Many of the things 'web rings' promoted were 'similar sites'.

Yet it was when google become big that it destroyed web rings and blog rolls (which were similar to web rings, but often included a variety of sites not just similars) -

It became known that google penalized people for linking to other sites, linking to 'bad neighborhoods' - they would sometimes call out sites publicly for giving 'link juice' to others for profit..

Web rings disappeared and blog rolls as well, because google.

Not because search engines got better, but because google threatened to penalize you for linking out.

I'd love to see a resurgence of them, google is ever increasingly becoming useless as a search tool that when I see the first page is junk I just give up on the search and make note of what I'm looking for and try again at a later time or use alternate means of information retrieval.

It feels like at some point in the last 5 years we crossed some threshold where search engines are so optimized to the commercial space and selling junk that obscure searches yield no useful information. Any keyword which is so unfortunate to overlap in the commercial product space will just dominate your results and make them mostly useless. Even my advanced google fu to tack on certain phrases and other bits of language to narrow things down and formerly gave very focused results but now feels like google is atrophying in that domain.

It doesn't help that our culture has become so word overload friendly where instead of creating new words and phonetic combinations existing words are used instead and now require disambiguation to say not the product kind of this word.

don't forget Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales's Bomis webring thing, featuring the Bomis Babe Report!