@Hondo69
I can answer at least part of your question.
It's the lack of libraries.
Not the physical buildings so much, but trained librarians - people expert in the arcane art of sorting, cataloguing, and then finding information.
@EC @Hondo69Restricting my answer to the English speaking world.
Computers are pretty good a processing documents. The more technical the document the better a computer can process it. I was heavily involved in first generation "natural language processing" back in my NASA days. The basic idea is simply.
If two documents discuss the same subject they probably use a lot of the same words.
Now back in the days of 400 meg hard drives and less than a meg ram all shared by 5 or 6 other people (HP9000) you had to get clever. I relied on the documents abstract and only processed that. I simply did not have the resources to process the entire document and store the results into a database (Oracle). Today that would not be a problem and that is exactly what google does.
However the quality of your results is better if you only process abstracts. This comment for example will be processed by some google crawler shortly after I post it. Now I might think this is a fine comment but in reality it is worthless junk to anyone looking for information about say nuclear waste. Now that I have used the words nuclear waste if you google for nuclear waste this comment will be included in your results. I'll throw in radioactive decay and I might even make in into the top 50% of the results. LOL.
So EC is largely right. Solely relying on computers gets you a lot of junk that you have to sort thru to find good info. Now gets some trained librarians to put eyes on and then keyword/index it into either Dewey Decimal system or Library of Congress Catalog system then give it a proper abstract and then process that and now you got yourself a document searching system that has precision.
How ever the costs of such a system will be vastly more. Precision does not come cheap. If anyone is interested for a few bucks I will be happy to build the software (indexing and searching) for such a system.
I will said I am impressed by google image search. There document search not so much.
