I think search engines are broken, but the Internet itself is probably not "dead". It's just our accessibility to that information. That's not super helpful until we have better search engines (which steer us away from this SEO stuff), but the good news is that building a better search engine is easier than resurrecting the Internet. In particular, there's a good chance that a niche, naive search engine might be able to significantly improve accessibility (e.g., high rankings for pages that answer user queries in the fewest bytes).