In my experience, Googling tends to give far deeper knowledge, as everything has explorable context - you can focus onto anything and out for wider view until it integrates well with your mental model of the world. This kind of integrated contextual knowledge together with some practice can go very deep.

Books just try to mindlessly ram information things through, but it just doesn't work for me. At all. I only ever use them for entertainment.

It's possible that people work differently, but I don't terribly like such hypotheses. It's also possible many people are simply not terribly good at using Internet, or that many disciplines don't yet have information available on the Internet - in the long term the normal case will far more information than you ever need available online, but this might not always be the case yet.