Fun thought experiment: Suppose the web didn't have any search engines, but somehow grew to its current size. Now suppose someone proposes starting one up. Exactly how large is the resulting firestorm?
I'm tempted to say that your hypothetical is either impossible, or it's already happened.
On the "impossible" side -- search engines, or search directories, pre-date the web. A lot of people downloaded their first web client from a Gopher link or by looking it up on Archie. HTML itself was kind of about providing an index for other files -- "index.html", get it?
However, on the "already happened" front, in 1997 Ticketmaster sued Microsoft just for linking to content on its website. And ever since automated search engines have been around, people have been suing them -- for replicating portions of their content without explicit permission, for instance.
1. Newspapers would be really upset about the leeching of their bandwidth and would cry around that this is "copyright infringement". Also the RIAA and other such organisations would show that you could search for torrents on them and would try to shut them down.
2. Newspapers and others would see the use of such a thing and would let them do their thing.
