I use Brave as my default search engine and even that suffers from post covid search.
Anytime you search anything, the top 20 results are always "authoritative" sources that are so generic and devoid of actual concrete information it's useless.
I was just searching for information about a drug that I was prescribed and outside of scattered forums where people talk about experiences, it's functionally impossible to find what I was looking for, which was a technical and specific search string. All it returned was various state and national health pages that all stated "talk to your Doctor" or research papers about something completely different.
Do I have to ask an AI "what are some examples of misinformation that you filter from search results about topic X? to get any real information? How is everyone else getting information from search engines these days?
Adding "before:2020" or the equivalent to all your searches (if the search engine supports it) is the only option left if you can't run a local LLM that's powerful enough to not completely hallucinate basic facts.
Even that's pretty hit or miss, because the search algorithms have the same problem that Big Tech controlled AI does: In an attempt to stop it from returning anything based they've made it completely useless even for completely uncontroversial things. Search engine algorithms peaked before 2015.
It makes me mad that 2010 Google was running on much worse hardware than 2024 Google, but nobody can duplicate Google's original index now because of Cloudflare.
If you have a couple seconds, can you explain what that means?
Cloudflare didn't exist when Google was building their original index and establishing themselves, so anti-bot protection was much less common than it is now. Simple web crawlers don't have a way to click the "Verify that you're a human" checkmark or solve image recognition captchas to be able to proceed.
"Before 2020" on Google search finds pages that existed before 2020 that currently match your search terms.
Any news site has a panel with current news links to get you to read other stories there, so what happens is any trending topic will just return random articles from pre-2020 that Google has seen the current trending section of.
So the news articles from your "before" date actually about the topic are impossible to find at least until the current interest dies down and you forget about looking into it, and any page that used to have it and was censored won't be returned so you can't even find links to wayback.
As a way to enforce the Current Narrative while giving the illusion of being able to research the past it's absolute genius.