[boblebricoleur]

We could have website-centered search engines. You ask the question on whatsthatquote.com and find out if someone has already asked it. If yes, you have your answer, if not someone answers and no one is annoyed. Stack overflow does that. You don't get ridiculed for asking a quesiton on so that has already been asked on another website you don't know of.

I guess that would be the age of smaller communities centerd around a few websites only? Maybe, I don't know if we can consider google as enabling a real global community as of today. I pretty much browse around the same websites. Anything I want to find without a precise source of information in mind, I use google and stumble upon ads and ads and sometimes ads, but rarely an answer.

I sometimes still search stuff manually browsing through websites indexes. Some things are difficult to find with keywords. Equations of which the name you forgot. Movies with a plot so generic billions of result would be associated with it on a search engine. That piece of music of which you could write the notes on a sheet but don't remember the title.