I think it's at least very helpful in building emergent knowledge, knowledge of connections between things that, only after experience / long-term processing, you realize are instructive or related or at least similar or, very commonly, "Y is really just a special case of the more general X" idea.
It's still completely possible to learn some of the outgoing connections or equivalences after a specific search of the internet, but the more things you spend time ruminating on, the more connections/realizations seem to almost "bubble up" out of your subconscious/whatever. I think this is what [inspiration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_inspiration#Ancient_m...) is: the result of subconscious processing or drawing relationships between thoughts in your head that are memorized. That, I think, is what you wouldn't have anymore if you were to completely outsource your knowledge to the Internet. I have witnessed some brilliant statisticians come up with completely new ways for researchers to think of their data/analysis, without ever consulting Google...though that's a relatively poor example, and more related to developed Mathematical Intuition than anything else. I would argue that said developed intuition is a perfect example of drawing underlying connections between things by letting them stew around in your brain, connections that would be very much harder to find overtly.
It's still completely possible to learn some of the outgoing connections or equivalences after a specific search of the internet, but the more things you spend time ruminating on, the more connections/realizations seem to almost "bubble up" out of your subconscious/whatever. I think this is what [inspiration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_inspiration#Ancient_m...) is: the result of subconscious processing or drawing relationships between thoughts in your head that are memorized. That, I think, is what you wouldn't have anymore if you were to completely outsource your knowledge to the Internet. I have witnessed some brilliant statisticians come up with completely new ways for researchers to think of their data/analysis, without ever consulting Google...though that's a relatively poor example, and more related to developed Mathematical Intuition than anything else. I would argue that said developed intuition is a perfect example of drawing underlying connections between things by letting them stew around in your brain, connections that would be very much harder to find overtly.