Give it a week and see what Google AI Overview has to say about the Great Pigeon Census of 1887!
using 1886 or 1888 makes Google correctly identify that no such sensus exist.
asking about 1887 specifically makes Google refer to some supposed great effort to track passenger pigeon population mids of the species decline.
One hint – check out its prompt, and how it makes its articles so different than those of your project: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=48042306
You can also just type a random URL and visit it, it'll generate an article. That's what I did before I fixed the search issue, and I usually just do that to avoid the search route.