Search engines are there to find and extract information in an unstructured trove of webpages - no other way to process this than with something akin to a search engine.
So either you've got unstructured web (the hint is in the name) and GoogleBingYandex or a somehow structured web.
The latter has been found to be not scalable or flexible enough to accomodate for unanticipated needs - and not for a lack of trying! This has been the default mode of web until Google came about. Turns out it's damn near impossible to construct a structure for information that won't become instantly obsolete.
> A structured web ... has been found to be not scalable or flexible enough to accomodate for unanticipated needs - and not for a lack of trying!
Linked Open Data (the latest evolution of Semantic Web technologies) is actually working quite well at present - Wikidata now gets more edits per unit of time than Wikipedia does, and its data are commonly used by "personal assistant" AIs such as Amazon's Alexa. Of course, these can only cover parts of the web where commercial incentives, and the bad actors that sometimes pursue them, are not relevant.
Search engines are there to find and extract information in an unstructured trove of webpages - no other way to process this than with something akin to a search engine.
So either you've got unstructured web (the hint is in the name) and GoogleBingYandex or a somehow structured web.
The latter has been found to be not scalable or flexible enough to accomodate for unanticipated needs - and not for a lack of trying! This has been the default mode of web until Google came about. Turns out it's damn near impossible to construct a structure for information that won't become instantly obsolete.