I fear that something like PageRank used to work well just because back then many individuals had personal web pages with well curated links. It seems like this has slowly gone away, and now Google et al. have to resort to increasingly more hand-tuned AI extravaganza to get the search to work decently well at all.
Ironically this sort of "links section" probably dropped out of favour in large part because you could find those pages easily through Google, which knew which ones were good because they were linked in a lot of peoples' links sections...
