I think that search engines like Google are unbeatable to find content that we already know about. On the other hand, those lists are great to discover what we don't already know about, such as new topics, etc. Just like the awesome lists on GitHub.
My thought exactly, and also why I don't just search 'latest news' on Google every morning. Human curation is a thing. (not sure how much human curation goes into ooh.directory, but I'm pretty sure they don't use Google's ranking algorithms to surface links)
* or "surfing the net", if you're old enough.
What are these lists you're talking about? Could you give an example?