1920s google, the mundaneum

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/health/17iht-17mund.13760031.html?_r=1

http://www.cracked.com/article_19783_5-futuristic-technologies-invented-in-wrong-century_p2.html

Way back in 1895, Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine had an idea: collect every bit of the world's knowledge, put it on 3 x 5 index cards (12 friggin' million of them, to be exact) and devise a system to make all that information easily accessible by anyone in the world.
So they convinced the Belgian government to support their efforts, hired a staff of librarians and set up shop. They called their creation the Mundaneum, presumably because they were well aware of how hard future steampunk nerds would dork their trousers over the name, and that was it: They invented the world's first search engine. Inquiries came in from all over the world via mail or telegraph -- more than 1,500 a year by some counts -- on basically any topic you could think of. If somebody wanted to know the Swahili word for boobies or which species of badger gave the least fucks, they sent in a request to the Mundaneum, which consulted its database and compiled an answer. It was sort of like Google, if Google collected your information via an intricate network of severe-looking women in petticoats.

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