Retrieval
The problem with searching a memory without rank is not that it finds nothing: it is that it finds too much. All similar, none decisive, and the decision is still yours with no more help than before.
Little, and with weight
What changes
A memory that filtered on the way in does not need much sorting on the way out. Half the work of retrieving well was done earlier, when deciding what got in.
It returns whatever looks most like what you typed. Since everything weighs the same, what floats to the top is the most recent or the longest, which is almost never the most useful. The agent gets a list and has to decide on its own what to trust. That is the same work it had before asking.
What arrives is what survived the entrance. No discarding needed: what is there can be used.
Each item knows its origin and how many times it helped. An agent can decide how much to trust it, which is different from trusting it or not.
If there is nothing consolidated on something, the answer is that there is nothing. Inventing a plausible answer is worse than not having one.