This was more or less a reflection of my personal experience.

When I was in school, we were taught how to do research. It involves going to Libraries and looking for primary secondary and tertiary sources via the Dewey decimal system. We were taught how to use almanacs and even had an almanac competition on how fast someone can find information.

Public institutions such as the Library system in the United States, were our "temple" of knowledge. Public support for Libraries was historically VERY high.

However, since the popularization of search engines, it has radically reshaped our expectations of finding information. We expect to find it at our fingertip, in less than 200ms, at the cost of quality and gatekeeping institutions that filtered out a lot of junk knowledge.

I was able to find a few articles talking about this: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2477/2279

I especially love the quote, "Conflation of information retrieval with knowledge"