In its glory days, “The Tonight Show” served as a search engine on culture, letting us know which politician had made a gaffe, which corporate evildoer had been caught doing evil and which starlet had experienced a wardrobe malfunction.

Now the search engine is the search engine — or more likely, any number of “did-you-see” alerts received by e-mail or on Facebook, Twitter or other sites we visit from our desktops or on our cellphones.