I used to work in a CS research lab as an RA while doing my MS. There were mailing lists and chat rooms back then to ask people for help. But if I ran into issues that no one had any clue about, it meant heading to the library and searching for books. I remember spending 3 months at the library on a particular linux kernal module issue, that turned out to be about 5 lines of code. I had to spend a whole lot of time figuring out where to make the change. But that change was effecting all kinds of other modules. Crashes would happen for random reasons. So I tell my prof its probably going to take another 3-6 months before I map out all the issues its creating.

And then Google afrives. So I do a query with the main line of my code change, to see if anyone is talking about it and I find one guy in Israel working on the same thing. Crying about the same issue on his blog and how he had fixed it. Thanks to which my work was over in 3 days. My prof would have funded me for that 6 months if thats how long it took. So it was a big aha moment for everyone.