For entertainment content, this is a double-edged sword.
There was no artwork, no knowledge panels, and certainly no video playback. Google was the card catalog, not the theater. However, Google had a secret weapon: PageRank. While other search engines ranked results by how many times a word appeared on a page, Google ranked by popularity. This inadvertently made it the first true tracker of "viral" culture. If a website was being talked about, it rose to the top of Google.
Trends shows you the velocity of search queries.