The world's librarians at least gave it a good effort. Do you still remember all those card catalogs at the library?

Not just that, I remember learning all of the different systems and being told how invaluable it was for research.

I caught what must have been the last itty bitty tail of that. I was a 3rd grader in 1993 and were taught all about the card catalog and the Dewey decimal system and taking notes on note cards and organizing them in notecard boxes and how important it all was for research. I'm glad we moved on from that. For me, it was a drag.

IIRC from when I visited a library earlier this year, they were still being used in the genealogy section.

Yes, I remember them but also observe that we’ve moved on from those trays of cards in narrow drawers systems (and good riddance!).

Those cards are no replacement for literal grep, of course. They were a search across a tiny summary of the contents, albeit a fairly structured one (which is helpful for some searches).

Thy this, get the real massive paper copy of the Grainger catalog from your local outlet.

Then download the catalog in PDF form.

Compare the speed with which you can page through 100 pages or more at maximum physical speed which is useful enough visually for you to get enough of a grasp to stop exactly where you need to, when you wouldn't know exactly what to search for in text form anyway.

dead trees dont change your search results and insert ads, add tracking and profiling

Or get updated content! Had a Lawrence block book where pages were added or removed from a kindle device.

Trevanian had an anecdote in shibumi about how he had to remove the description of a museum robbery from later editions of an earlier book - the eiger sanction.

I own the first edition of both, obviously.

Most books where that is important have an index.

More often than not they are a bit lackluster, unfortunately.