Jorge Luis Borges' 1941 short story imagines a library made of hexagonal rooms, containing every book that could ever be written — every combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation within a fixed length. Somewhere in it is the true story of your life, and a million false ones, indistinguishable by cover. The library is infinite, complete, and almost entirely useless.
Total recall, zero retrieval
Borges' librarians go mad not from lack of information but from its total, undifferentiated abundance. A collection with no way to distinguish signal from noise contains, for practical purposes, no information at all — a point information theorists would later formalise, but which fiction reached first. Storage was never the hard problem. Retrieval was, and remains, the hard problem.
The internet's own hexagons
It is tempting, and not entirely wrong, to read the Library of Babel as a prophecy of the internet: near-infinite content, in which any specific true thing is technically present but practically unfindable without a working index. The difference is that Borges' library had no catalogue by design — it was a thought experiment about meaning without structure. The internet has catalogues; they're simply optimised for something other than your specific question.
An archive without an index is not a resource. It is a maze with the exit removed.
Every ranking algorithm, taxonomy, and site structure discussed on this journal exists to keep our own Babel from closing in.