I don’t think it’s searching for things that’s the problem, it’s creating things of value. There’s no reason to create a great piece of content if no one sees it. To get people to see it you need to fill it with fluff for google.
I think the problem is figuring out how we systematically identify things of value.
My personal feeling is that the solution lies in having good 'seed' URLs with which to build indexes. This might be done using curated lists, as a number of people here suggest, or perhaps through crawling and scoring the content.