Tried four separate search engines. Was looking for news articles or any other statements regarding trump’s activity and statemnts after 9/11. I distinctly remember him commenting about how he now had the “tallest building in Manhattan” or some such arrogant and callous lies rather quickly following the event.
But it seems pretty difficult to find ways to bracket dates on search engines, and even the ones that I could do so, the search results were partially “poisoned” by sites deliberately returning current information post-dated to the date range I was looking for. But all the results that would have been readily returned say a decade or more ago are gone. They don’t even show up.
Where did it all go?
All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. - Orwell: 1984
Edit: not trying to be unthankful for the help, I know there are plenty of current articles referencing what he said 25 years ago, but I was looking for the actual article from a first-hand source in 2001-2 when he actually said it.
SEO and then AI
This. Right before AI became public, I remember Google searches were getting more and more crammed with SEO bullshit. Now we have AI powered SEO and searching for anything is super difficult.
Google also heavily enshittified search in 2019: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
tl;dr: The engineer who spent his life trying to make search good disagreed with the suit that pointed out, “but if people have to keep coming back then we can show more ads!”
Words were exchanged. Mostly “fuck” and “you” in that order. Money won.
There was a piece on npr a few days back, all things considered, that talked to someone who was talking about search and seo and ai and such.
The tldr was that seo tools before ai gave you a lot of information that you could use to grow a website. Ai search on the other hand is a black box that may or may not do anything at all.
Honestly I don’t know if anybody was talking about trump’s dumb comment at that point except the live news show he called in to
On sep 16 the LA Times posted an article about “NYCs tallest building, again” (The Empire State Building), and if they had caught wind of trumps comments they might have included it as being incorrect.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-16-mn-46445-story.html
it seems pretty difficult to find ways to bracket dates on search engines
Are you searching on your phone? I haven’t used Google in a while, but it used to be that you could enter specific dates for custom search ranges on news articles - but only in desktop mode. If you’re searching on your phone, try switching to desktop mode, then entering your custom dates.
Are you familiar with the concept of signal-to-noise ratio?
Good information is probably still out there somewhere, but sadly it is bound to get increasingly lost in an endless sea of stupid bullshit and generative AI slop. The internet will probably never go back to the way it was before, and will instead becoming increasingly polluted with useless recycled data.
It’s up to the rest of us to begin collecting and curating good data.
I don’t doubt that at all. But I hoped that searching with a date range limited to 2002 and earlier would turn up an article written at the time… but most all of that seems to be gone or in un-indexed archives.
I think as news sites update they lose some of their old stories. Internet archive may have what you want.
It only exists if the search engines say it exists.
Only about 15% of world texts, documentary, and archival materials have been digitized. But, since two generations now have no idea how to access data off line, it might as well be on the moon.
Imagine the power that comes from controlling what everyone can find on the internet.
Took 3 minutes …
It was an amazing phone call. 40 Wall Street actually was the second tallest building in downtown Manhattan and it was, actually before the World Trade Center, the tallest. And when they built the World Trade Center it became known as the second tallest and now it’s the tallest," the future president told WWOR at the time.
Even has the audio, he was calling in to Howard Stern
I wanted the original, day-of commentary. The actual article about what he said, the day he said it.
And I gave you the actual audio of what he said…
If you legitimately don’t understand why that’s what you were asking for, I understand why you have difficulty googling things in 2026
He wants the original article that was written and posted in 2001.
I have been downvoted so many times when I’ve responded to claims that “nothing ever dies on the internet” or like information once on the internet never goes away.
sure, a lot of it is still around, but a shit ton is NOT. Case in point.
But sorry, I have no topical answers to help :(
If it’s useful information, it’s likely to fucking disappear.
If it’s embarrassing toxic shit that will haunt you forever, that is now a meme and everyone will have a copy.
They’re actively killing it.
I’ve had okay luck with the internet archive for news articles.
News sites don’t keep things online forever, even if they are still operating. I wish I knew that there was an industry standard and what that standard was. I’d save more things for myself knowing there was an expiry date.
I think that would be nice.
I think it’d be cool if there were a common standard for a “Paper of Record”. A news outlet is considered a Paper of Record if it makes its publications public within a certain amount of time (say, 60 or 90 days after initial publication), keeps it available for a minimum amount of time so that archivists can copy it (ideally, provide a torrent), and don’t modify the contents after they’re published (appending updates is OK. Encouraged even, in my opinion). Maybe some other criteria I haven’t thought of in these few minutes too.
There could be a torrent network of archivists, each hosting copies of news articles they consider important. anyone could join the network at any time and get their own copies of articles to host, maybe because a certain article is down to a few copies and they want it preserved. It would be a huge boon to historians I bet.
I just tried it, it has really spotty coverage from 25 years ago. I was only able to find a very few pages and even what it does have is just the front page kind of view. Nothing specific.
Who’d have ever thought that microfiche would be the pinnacle of our archival technology.
Librarians
I went to google.com and typed in “trump tallest building in Manhattan” and there it was.
This extension helps a lot - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nogoogleai/
All the articles I found of that type were current articles referencing what he said…IOW “Did trump actually say thing about 9/11?” “Video resurfaces about trump…”
I wanted the original text in situ from the day of. But maybe these will have to do.
Oh, I see!
Yeah the internet was a different world in 2001, hardly any of the websites from that time are still running and those that are will have rebuilt themselves multiple times over, often changing url structure in the process.
This kind of thing is just about my most frequent use-case in GPT. I find it generally very good for crafting complex searches, and it can go in steps, offering to search various types of archives as you direct it and redirect it.
The great thing is that you don’t have to fish around for just the right words, as with traditional search engines. Just explain in plain language, and away it goes.
EDIT: Rock on with the paranoid, anti-AI downvotes! 🙃
