Kind of like the Good Old Days™? Jokes aside, Search engines are for stuff we don't know... I get my news from some sites, this one for example, and I don't depend o Google for that... But when I want to know about the viability of zipping a UTF-8 encoded text to save space on my DB, there is no way to get may answer without a search engine...
If there's anything the modern internet has taught me it's that the Good Old Days were doing some things right! We don't know how to scale trust to internet-sized communities yet so a little tribalism may be warranted.
The way this solution solves the I Don't Know What I Don't Know Problem is by making you curate your own list of experts. For your example query, a colleague may have told you about a popular list that thousands of DBAs subscribe and contribute to. So when you search that query it has the sites to crawl and find the material
