Show HN: Oldest Search – Search for the oldest result on internet

oldestsearch.com

9 points·jarrenae··4 comments

Oldest Search is a custom google search that specifically targets the oldest entries available. I'm always curious about the first entries for certain data on the internet, it's a valuable perspective builder.

I personally like news articles that have been digitized that were written in the pre-internet era. Unfortunately some results don't always work well because pages have been dated incorrectly. For example, searching "Covid" shows recent results.

I launch new projects like this daily: small tools to increase human agency. I'm also very open to suggestions to improve!

I wonder how this deals with bad data. Often when searching for a term that was invented in the last few years, I'll find search results dating back to the 1990s because someone inserted new keywords on an old article. Ugh.

Where do the dates come from?

The results (after all the ads) for “COVID-19” claimed to be from 2001, but were clearly more recent.

Edit: is the date the first time the URL was seen, but the search terms match on current content?

I don't think that's it. Try searching for something old - like 'arpanet'. The dates are actually arranged quite nicely in order, starting with 1970. But the dates don't correspond to the url itself, the urls are all definitely much more recent. The dates for the most part correspond to the date of publication of a document (like an RFC or academic paper). But some are different, like this one that is just a 'This day in history' article written _about_ the arpanet on Oct 27 1980.. so, in short I have no idea.

It's pretty neat though.

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