Semantic web was supposed to help long ago, and may finally be doing so. In www. genenetwork.org we are now using RDF SPARCL and GraphQL and Xapian for speedy and flexible search that can represent much of our complex metadata. Surprising how long this has taken to catch on.
What seems to help in the life sciences is the existence of public repositories. These could be replaced by portals that collect info on data hosted elsewhere. But the main advantages are that they provide clear, well known places to start looking and they curate, standardize and organise the metada to make it searchable.