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.

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 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

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.

https://www.newsweek.com/video-trump-saying-he-now-had-tallest-manhattan-building-9-11-goes-viral-anniversary-1628184

Even has the audio, he was calling in to Howard Stern

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/

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! 🙃

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.

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

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 :(

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.

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.

They’re actively killing it.

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.

He wants the original article that was written and posted in 2001.

I think as news sites update they lose some of their old stories. Internet archive may have what you want.

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.

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.

SEO and then AI

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Pretty bloody easy to find, I just searched for "trump claims he has biggest building in Manhattan after 9/11" https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-bragged-tallest-building/

Tldr it wasn't a callous lie, and it was pretty close to being entirely factual

It was a TV interview though

Adding onto this for people who don't understand, Donald Trump saying stupid shit on Howard Stern was not front page news in 2001. He was a D-List celebrity. It likely received almost zero coverage because no one cared. He was just another dumb out of touch millionaire and people were more focused on figuring out what the fuck just happened and what kind of response was warranted.

This would be like if Sarah Jessica Parker went on a podcast during the early days of COVID to complain that she can't get shoes from her normal sweat shop. Sure it's a stupidly insensitive thing to say, but people have other things on their mind right now.

My first guess for something like this would be your local library's databases, or Archive.org. 🤔

It's crazy how poisoned search has gotten over the last like ten years.

It wasn't even stupid shit, they asked him if his buildings were at risk and he said it was now the tallest building in Manhattan (true by number of floors, but 20 foot shorter than the true tallest) which is not unfair thing to bring up if you think terrorists are attacking the tallest buildings

I was searching for who said a specific comment about a book that Churchill wrote. I remembered the comment correctly but not who said it and where. So I asked the AI to see if it can find it for me. It did, right away. I was satisfied. But then I started to doubt myself a bit, tried to find the source but I couldn't. I asked the AI to make sure that it was suggesting the correct person, turns out, it wasn't. It even apologized, said "sorry, I was mistaken, it wasn't X who said it, it was actually Y!" and then I was again happy... For a second. I Asked it to make sure, perhaps find a source for it.. It couldn't. So I gave up on that, took out my copy of "Walking With Destiny" and flipped through the pages for like 4 hours and found the quote and who said it and where. The AI didn't suggest the correct answer at any point.

So yeah... AI might be good at times, but sometimes it just makes shit up for you. I still use it to find stuff, if I cant find it myself, but I ask it to find the actual source and give that to me, instead of just trusting it.

Yes, good points. Hallucination is common. LLM's have a bias towards hallucination and taking shortcuts. Part of why I always try to err on the side of simple queries, as well as ask for sources on anything that looks promising.

Also, different LLM's and different flavors of LLM's can fetch considerably different results. Google's built-in Gemini is still hilariously bad at times. Personally I usually use GPT, partly because it lets me program it in ways that stay global between sessions. Very helpful for getting it to stay on point and sober with the facts.

It's not unlike curating one's FV or Reddit feed-- you have to put in the work over time setting it up to best answer your particular needs.

I'd be so down to code a basic ass website from scratch, hell, it can even be a static website where we host it on either some Asian servers where the west has no jurisdiction to send DMCA requests, or on a decentralized network chain, and fucking moderate it, search for the news people can not find, publish it, and all that

It all boils down to unfortunately, you still need some kinda money to operate this shit. We have a problem in this modern age with unification, and being the voice for others. Financially it's so easy to develop this, if people could give a shit and throw a few buxes onto the people who would take the responsibility of such website.

I did it on phone and desktop. The search modifiers are the same.

Search engines are fucked and will get worse, we need open source search engines desperately.

But as to your question, I saw an article just this morning with prez' statements on 9/11, in the guardian I think. I didn't read it because I try to ignore things prez says while following actual events.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/09/trump-911-falsehoods

I guess it's only the top 6 sorry.

Does it not bother you, search engines make their ai agent at the top of the page, then remove applicable results, so you have to use that agent to get that information?

You can't say they need the ai to find the results, because we saw search engines work better without them for 20 years.

I've only seen that with Google. If the result is useful, then I'll consider it. If not, then I'll scroll past to the search results.

Google's pure convenience, though. It's been compromised for years, but does have a huge database. If I'm not finding what I want, then I'll try something else.

Problem?

All the search engines became shit at once. Also I was forced to use bing the other day, shich ddg also is a sort of instance of, and both also have the ai agent lording over the results they no longer offer you.

All the search engines are engaged in an illegal shittrust to maximize revenue, and they've all removed many many applicable results, from links to streaming and downloading, to news articles, to everything.

Pure convenience my foot, Google is a shit company actively becoming worse, and only a frog in a boiling pot of google's shit doesn't see how bad it's gotten since 2021.

*ribbit!* *ribbit!*

You know there's an extension you can add that blocks Gemini from search results, right?

However, if you're truly that hand-wringingly concerned over this stuff, and don't like DuckDuckGo (or whatever), there's also a P2P search engine project, SearXNG: https://searx.space/

Thanks for the tip, I tried those other alternates and none worked well so far, the pay one is supposed to be good, maybe I will give that one another chance I do appreciate it.

But that's neither here nor there. They removed results we wanted, to force us to use their AI. That's the big problem here.

And google's full of shit about removing gemini. I followed multiple recent articles about removing it from my phone and none of the instructions worked, not even the ones published by google.

Idk about google search specifically because I use startpage, a proxy server that runs google through it, based in the netherlands, started in the wake of the Snowden revelations, that keeps your browsing history anonymous. But you can also view pages anonymously from it, though not all sites work with that.

it was callous and it wasn’t true, but it was not a lie used to any particular end.

it was callous because a bunch of people died, but he doesn’t have any room in his tiny head to fit empathy

It's the tallest by number of floors, but technically 20 foot shorter by absolute height, I think we can let this slide

It's still there, but Google has no incentive to rank it particularly high due to SEO and how they make money.

There are indexes that are better at searching the small web, instead of funneling everything to Facereddittube l. Kagi is a my recommendation, but there are many others.

From what I can tell, the search engines now heavily favor recently updated and new content and push old content way down in the results or as it seems more recently will quite often not even show it at all.

Have you tried old sites that actually scan/preserve old newspapers? The moguls cannot scrub them words away as easily.