But going back to a card catalog system, you can really only search in ways that someone else has created. You can't search by words within an article, you can't search using regular expressions (or at least some boolean operators), and you can only find things as fast as you can thumb through a stack of cards. At least with a search engine, if I type in a query that isn't going to find me what I'm actually looking for, I can quickly change my query and try again. Also, I'm relying on a librarian to know what I'm asking for. Someone can be very helpful in pointing you towards a stack that contains books about my subject but I will still need to do the work of searching through the books to find relevant ones and then still search through them individually to find the bit on info I need. I'm going to encounter a lot of information I don't care about. With a Google Scholar or University library search engine, I'm going to find the exact keywords I'm looking for and maybe some other related terms that I didn't think of. Search engines can be very helpful but you need to know what you are looking for otherwise you are just going to end up doing the same browsing you would have been doing 30+ years ago.