I'm confused by your analogy. A wiki run server is extremely efficient to run, and can be hosted from a tiny little raspberry pie. A search engine can be optimized to provide results near O(1). You can even pull up and read results on a very old computer. All of the concerns around cost and resource efficiency can be addressed as all of this is a solved problem.

Even with an LLM agent getting cheaper to run in the future, it's still fundamentally non-deterministic so the ongoing cost for a single exploration query run can never get anywhere near as cheap as running a wiki with a proper search engine.