This is still how web searching works. I have no idea why you would think otherwise--at its core Google is still fundamentally an indexing service, and you use indices by figuring out which words may be in the documents you want to read and then finding the documents containing those. Without doing this, it becomes impossible to distinguish documents which <i>are</i> what you want from documents which <i>describe</i> what you want (and which often refer to something behind a paywall or in a private or non-digitized collection).