True, I feel like automated systems also seem to still be pretty far behind in terms of providing useful results for certain forms of discovery, but is still pretty easy for people. Take this question and most of Ask HN, there's some pretty interesting/useful results within a few minutes. But providing a question like mine to google and most results will yield pages of "alternative search engines to google" websites, which is no where near correct, but does "sound" correct if you didn't understand the context of my question, such as, what the Internet is and what a search engine is (and isn't).

But then, I feel like it doesn't really scale super well, and doesn't always handle vagueness. For example, even of HN I doubt there will be very many quality/useful answers, simply because there's a certain kind of popularity required to get that here. Looking at something like Quora, there's too much room for non-answers and what amounts to spam. Then, there's the difficulty of being specific enough that people can answer but also do so in a timely manner (the speed of a search engine to provide simply a "close enough" result is part of its utility).

Like the bibliography suggestion, although I said practicality doesn't matter, its an example of how interesting stuff can be discovered (without asking anyone) but requires a huge amount of time (after the initial "look up") and cognitive effort (but that's a kind of curve that tapers off once one is familiar with a particular area of research).