Google still relies on institutions to provide data in indexable form, and those institutions build their reputations in ways that only partially rely on Google traffic.
I mean, a competent librarian has a kind of expertise that Google's algorithms don't, so that's one situation to explore for a post-Google idea of finding information (of course it's also pre-Google).
The social aspect of information discovery is something that Google and Facebook are kind of fighting over, but fundamentally it doesn't belong to them—it belongs to "us" intrinsically.
They shut down Google Reader but they can't shut down the human tendency to share information!
And the panopticon information provided by Google is often just a mesmerizing massive overload with no curation, weight, intelligence...
Wikipedia is the top hit for so many searches that one could see Google as an interface for it. Add Wikivoyage/Wikitravel, some other community wikis, API interfaces a la DuckDuckGo, social curation, etc, and you might find that the value of Google Search is actually not that incredible.