Sunday Supplement: Freeman Dyson's Warm-Blooded Space Plants
Treating Google like a time machine can unearth some historical treasures.
Hello, Gardeners of the Galaxy, and welcome to the GotG Sunday Supplement, premium content for my top Rocket Boosters!
There's a lot of talk at the moment about the enshittification of the internet. Cory Doctorow coined the phrase, and it's about the way internet media platforms become increasingly unusable once they have become part of the fabric of our lives. Although Google was once the shining star of search engines, for example, people are now finding it increasingly useless, clogged with ads and worthless content designed merely to make the algorithm happy. Since the world went ga-ga for generative AI, the problem has only become worse. Even if you do now end up at a web page with interesting content, how do you know it wasn't hallucinated by an AI?
If you're looking for historical information, then one potentially useful tool is to tell Google you're looking for something before 2023.
That's enough to get you back before generative AI muddied the waters, although you'll still have to cope with the ads and the junk web pages.
Someone (jokingly, I think) suggested turning back the clock further and searching for results from before Google Search really existed. I thought I would try it, and the results were fascinating!
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