Are search engines a stop gap measure?

At the outset of the World Wide Web, when there was little order to the vast amount of information on the internet, search engines were essential in finding what you wanted. But as information is ordered, and databases built, their role becomes less and less important. If you want to look up a movie, you could use a search engine, or you could use IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase). As more websites (online databases), that are equivalently comprehensive, are created, the importance of the search engine is increasingly diminished. So, why isn’t Google (both exposed to this trend and cash rich) not buying up and developing these databases?


[N.B. obviously search is still necessary in the sense of database queries, but I see this as different to a search engine's database of crawled websites]