What if Search engines didn't exist

I'm an avid surfer, and browse through numerous sites a day. I spend a lot of time looking up things, and am overtly dependent on search engines. It just struck me as to how it would affect me, or a billion other people if search engines didn't exist. So here's a case study on a search done without a search engine.

Search Term: Trekking in India

Problem
Find out the web address for trekking agency(s) in India

Approach
I started doing what I would normally do if looking for an address in the real world: look in the phone directory, or in this case look into internet directories. By the way, please remember that you don't go looking for directories you have never heard of. I applied the same approach; I only knew of Google Directory and Dmoz, and thus I only searched on these sites

Results
  •  Google: The screen shots will tell you that I ended up with nothing
Home Page- Google Directory
 Category Page (I clicked on Hiking)

  Hiking Page





  •  Dmoz: Failed again (Screenshot below)



 Hiking Page (Similar page resulst as Google)


Inference
  1.  If search crashes on the internet, we are lost (people might argue that this will never happen but I'm just exploring the hypothetical case that it does)
  2. Internet directories aren't the best. In fact they are unfriendly to a great extent and did not inspire a lot of confidence in me
  3. These directories are a repository of information as submitted by people, website omners etc. There is no validity or logic to all the data.
  4. Long live Google, Bing and all the other search engines. Simply cause if they crash, or cease to exist, the web would collapse.
  5. Search engines have made us dependent; dependent on them for even looking for the simplest things for which we earlier had another search engine called Friends' reference
  6. It does make sense distributing pamphlets with your web address on it
  7. It makes even better to give your web address out along with tissues :) (Visit Japan to experience this)


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