The thing is, we would never go back to just those things. You're ignoring all the other, much more significant developments that have taken place since.
For example, today we have social networking sites, blogs, and services like Twitter and StumbleUpon. All of these allow huge numbers of human-recommended links to be passed around very quickly.
I'm not saying that search engines aren't useful; in fact, I'm not really sure how we've jumped from the kind of Google services that were being criticised in the original article to attacking their search engine specifically. I'm just saying that if search engines went away, it's reasonable to assume that the web-surfing world would adapt, and that new and improved ways to find useful content have been invented and will continue to be developed whether or not search engines are around in their current form.
For example, today we have social networking sites, blogs, and services like Twitter and StumbleUpon. All of these allow huge numbers of human-recommended links to be passed around very quickly.
I'm not saying that search engines aren't useful; in fact, I'm not really sure how we've jumped from the kind of Google services that were being criticised in the original article to attacking their search engine specifically. I'm just saying that if search engines went away, it's reasonable to assume that the web-surfing world would adapt, and that new and improved ways to find useful content have been invented and will continue to be developed whether or not search engines are around in their current form.