First answer: Wrong (imho) - you need search when you want to be able to stay up to date, rather than relying on outdated resources or single sources of information with vested interests.

If you did know where to find eveything? Well, that would be called being omnipotent, and, as a God you probably wouldn't waste time on the internet.

Social networks - yes, but which one will you look on? Or will you go through them one by one? Why do market comparison sites work again? Ah yes, convenience.

Almost all the other examples are trivially answered with - no, no I wouldn't. I would use my search engine du jour (currently Google) and it would tend to put the same answers as the slow manual way suggested here near the top, but also give me alternative perspectives.

Now, I am not saying we should rely on Google (or any other search engine), and I do make use of crowd-sourced search via the lovely people I know and follow on Twitter. But this article seems, to me, to lack under