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?
"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.