Before we had the Internet, much of the work that has now been taken over by Google and other search engines was done, the old-fashioned way, by poring over secondary sources such as newspapers and magazines.
In the 1980s, while working as an analyst in a market-research company, I typically went through six to eight Japanese-language newspapers and 専門紙 (senmonshi, trade publications) a day.
The purpose of this research was to sift through information in the public domain to hunt for, and report on, 社会や消費者市場の新しい動向 (shakai ya shōhisha shijō no atarashii dōkō, new social or consumer market trends). We focused on certain key words and expressions in Japanese and their frequency of appearance, and then used content analysis on those words and expressions to hunt for shifts or changes in market behavior.