It would be great if there was a good way to find existing projects that achieve what we seek. Usually, the biggest names are visible, and it's hard to find alternatives that achieve specific ideas.
Oddly enough, I find page 2 (and beyond) of Google results to be incredibly different than page 1 in the way that you describe. When shopping, for example, (in normal search, not the Shopping tab) I'll often have heard of every store on page 1 and almost no stores on page 2+. Using default of 10 results per page.
There is a website called alternative.to which kinda does this for most things, it’s user maintained but it works pretty well for most things, but sometimes fails for smaller projects
