I find it's the opposite: engines are so biased toward new content that older but still useful (or crucial) results are buried. I feel like an archeologist some days, carefully digging through the strata to find ancient hidden treasure.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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You make like Kagi. It's a search engine that lets you - among other things - search old articles. It's a paid service though (but they offer a free 100 queries trial)
Any search engine I've ever used allowed me to filter for results from the past month/year/etc.
The real shower thought is that most people don't know how to use advanced search settings anymore when it used to be common knowledge you needed to find anything even slightly niche
Maybe they searched for “how to limit search results by date”, but the instructions they found were obsolete.
So set it to only display results from X past years.
I want more than Twitter results though.
this is just a symptom, bigger issue is new data being behind walls
Worse, many articles do not have the year in the date. What the hell is up with that?
and many have a recent date on old, even totally obsolete, articles or posts.
I get entirely too annoyed about both cases.
Odd. I find it to be the exact opposite. If I want a real article, with thought put into it beside how to make it pop up as #1 in the search engine, I need to set the most recent date possible as prior to 2015 (sometimes even further back).
I suppose it depends on what you're looking for. News articles obviously have to be recent, and it's relatively difficult to bullshit your way into an informative news piece. Advice or DIY instructions though? You better search waaaay far back.
It is because of google's SEO algorithms. Old content has been around far more to rank up higher. And because people only click on first results. Newer content can't rank against websites with more authority. Sometimes changing the date filter helps.
Their seo scores go down though if the page doesn't regularly change whenever the Google bot revisits it though. As it means it is stagnant and no longer being updated.
In the past month I've seen mentioned on Lemmy, and downloaded an important article on global climate change, from the late 1800s (Eunice Foote - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote#%22Circumstances_Affecting_the_Heat_of_the_Sun's_Rays%22), and I'm glad to have come across it. The knife of time cuts in both directions.
I feel like this mainly happens with tech (the kind that's not super new and fancy)