> Information stored on paper in some filing cabinet in some office for all practical purposes simply doesn't exist. It can't be easily searched, retrieved or a

> Information stored on paper in some filing cabinet in some office for all practical purposes simply doesn't exist. It can't be easily searched, retrieved or accessed by someone who's not in the same room and doesn't exactly know what he's looking for. In other words: That information is lost. You can't find anything if you don't know what you're looking for, be it through a search box or a pile of drawers filled with paper. A search engine is just a sophisticated index. Information, in any form, is only retrievable once a certain hierarchy is imposed upon it (be it scarce or not) and some sort of index is there (be it in your mind---the invoice is in New Folder (3)---or actually written down somewhere, or somehow generated and operated by a search tool). Yes you certainly can't grep paper (you can try though, there's OCR if one wants to go to those lengths, and that certainly can be useful for lots of tasks, even in the personal scale), but you can't grep your text files if you don't have a search term at hand.