&quot;A sufficiently advanced search engine&quot; should be the new &quot;sufficiently advanced compiler.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ll give an example of how difficult that is. I am researching the historical development of graph canonicalization for chemical information. I have bits and pieces from published papers, but did those people work together or independently?<p>The papers include institutions, so I know two of the people (Gluck and Morgan) worked together at DuPont before Morgan went to the Chemical Abstract Service. The latter then cites a presentation Mooers gave at an American Mathematical Society meeting in 1958.<p>But what was the relationship or key insight from Mooers?<p>A key detail came from an autobiographical essay from 2001 at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asis.org&#x2F;History&#x2F;12-lynch.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asis.org&#x2F;History&#x2F;12-lynch.pdf</a> , which contains the following:<p>&gt; I was party to a conversation in which Harry Morgan [CAS] and Calvin Mooers discussed the issue of a canonical connection table. Mooers, in the light of the counter-example raised against the work of Dave Gluck, suggested a permutational approach to the design of an algorithm, which would overcome the objections. Harry Morgan (1965) then devised the method that bears his name and that has been a keystone in chemoinformatics since that time.<p>That reveals a closer connection than seen in the papers. But what was this counter-example?<p>I then read <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oai.dtic.mil&#x2F;oai&#x2F;oai?verb=getRecord&amp;metadataPrefix=html&amp;identifier=AD0460819" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oai.dtic.mil&#x2F;oai&#x2F;oai?verb=getRecord&amp;metadataPrefix=ht...</a> which says:<p>&gt; The presentation of counterexamples, such as the arbitrarily numbered planar graph in Figure 5 devised by Dr. Lehman of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, have necessitated revisions to canonical ordering techniques such as those used by DuPont and the Chemical Abstracts Service.<p>And there is it - the counter-example. But notice the use of institutional names, not published papers?<p>How is a search engine supposed to make those connections?<p>I can totally understand the argument that people should be referring to unique names, instead of a choice of names, to make this sort of thing easier for mechanized search. But that&#x27;s not how people work. Why are they using institutional names? Because those components, like canonicalization, are part of a much larger system, which is more coupled to the institution than a single person.<p>Hence why there&#x27;s this marvelous publication (for a historian) which is a survey of the chemical information systems in the US in the early 1960s. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=B0ArAAAAYAAJ&amp;lpg=PA172&amp;ots=TP5X6xlSJM&amp;dq=survey%20of%20chemical%20notation%20systems&amp;hl=de&amp;pg=PR1#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=B0ArAAAAYAAJ&amp;lpg=PA172&amp;ots...</a> . Indexed by institutions and people.<p>Take away the latter, anonymize everything to just published papers, and the structure for understanding things collapses.