It is said that the like-minded people think alike and hence we see different people from various backgrounds coming together to build business, industry, relationships, empires, companies and so on. These people faced problems and decided to find solutions which led them to each other and the inventions.
Therefore, it becomes extremely important to conduct a search before finding a solution to a problem as it is highly likely that somewhere someone (alone or together) may have faced a similar problem and found a similar/same solution. In other words, there is no point re-inventing the wheel.
Sanjeeta Das discusses the various aspects of searches in her Mondaq article, which can be viewed at http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=800242