There wasn't a search engine for Usenet for a long time (other than grep'ing the spool dirs), which was frustrating. I would argue it's more like some combo of

There wasn't a search engine for Usenet for a long time (other than grep'ing the spool dirs), which was frustrating. I would argue it's more like some combo of "more people connected together who can answer, an ability to quickly find relevant pervious answers, coupled with some amount of social capital accrual that makes taking the time to answer worthwhile". Those things make me think 'internet' is at least a big part of the answer.