You find things through real-world networking, or hyperlinks from other websites. Of course it's much easier to use a general search engine like Google. The point is that a search engine becoming bad doesn't suddenly mean "the internet" is unusable and you have to resort to going to a library or something.

I just don't like it when people conflate a couple large websites with the "internet" itself, which is really just an evolution of telephone and telegraph systems that connect the world together. The utility of accessing remote data doesn't go away. And pretending it does is hyperbole.

The internet is also so much more open and easy to access than any system before it. Telephone and telegraph systems were so much more limited. Like a phone number is attached to your identity as a real person in a way that an IP address or network interface isn't. That's a really powerful thing.