Search the Past Developer djsumdog released an open-source search tool, "search the past," that adds date-range parameters to Bing and other engines so users can surface pre-chatbot web results, with source code published on GitLab. The project's author reported that Bing's date filter encodes dates as days since a specific epoch, that Yandex's documented date-query syntax no longer works and was removed from the tool, and that a 2006-dated search result for an Nvidia RTX 3080-Ti — a card released in 2020 and purchased by the author in 2021 — shows web page dates can be falsified by SEO or LLM-generated articles. The author argues time-based queries help researchers avoid modern LLM-generated documents, while noting archived sites carry their own integrity problems. Search the Past In today’s world of content generated by the Weighted Random Word Generators also known as Large Language Models LLMs ; too often incorrectly referred to as Artificial Intelligence , the vast majority of top search results are a mix of mainstream news sites and automatically generated articles, which are difficult to read and verify for correctness. Too many people simply read and trust the generated answer at the top of the search results. For those who want to look deeper, the first step is to set your Internet time machines to the past, before the era of the modern chatbot. Time Machine Here is a simple search form that supports date ranges for several search engines. I’ve made the source code available under the search the past project https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/search-the-past . You can easily modify it or embed it into your website or personal dashboard. Technical challenges Adding query parameters to Bing was a challenge. Their web user interface is broken, and you cannot manually type in dates on all web browsers I’ve tried. You have to click to cycle dates. The query parameters Bing adds are complex, and even repeated interrogations to LLMs only produced queries that were wrong. Thankfully, someone on the Fediverse