There was a time when searching the internet was, above all, a way to orient yourself in the past. Before artificial intelligence began to flood the web with texts, images and responses generated in seconds, the web was slower, more irregular… and, in some ways, more human. Today, however, 50% of the content on the internet is created with artificial intelligence. And the numbers will increase: in 2030 between 90 and 99% will be “ownership” of an AI, according to experts at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies (CIFS). That raises a practical question: how to go back? How to ensure that the content has been created by humans, with their successes and mistakes?
It’s not about nostalgia, but about method. Filtering results before 2023 has become an effective way to isolate content that, with a high probability, was created without the intervention of current generative models, which reduces originality and increases the possibility of repetitions and “unintentional” errors. It’s not a perfect filter (the web has always had automation), but it is a way to reduce noise.
The most direct way is to write “the time” within the search itself. Search engines understand instructions as orders, both in the mandatory and classification senses. By adding “before:2023” or “before:2023” after whatever we search for, the system is being told to ignore everything published from that year onwards. The difference is immediate: recent articles, rewritten summaries, and pages optimized for current algorithms disappear.
It can also be further refined. If instead of a cut a specific period is needed, just combine limits: “after:2020 before:2023” or “after:2020 before:2023”both options are valid, even if the English of the requested dates is mixed with the Spanish of the instructions.
It is a way of limiting the context, of placing the information at a specific moment, as if we were taking a temporal photograph. In topics such as health, technology, history or politics, this precision can completely change the interpretation of what is read.
For those who prefer not to write these types of orders, the search engines themselves offer a visual alternative. After performing a search, a “Tools” option appears that allows you to select a date range. It is, in essence, the same operation, but translated into a menu. Choosing a custom range and setting a limit before 2023 produces a similar effect: the present disappears from the equation.
There is a third way, less used but equally useful: Advanced Search. Allows you to filter by language, region or update date. It is not always so precise if we want to go back beyond 2020but it is valuable when you want to cross several criteria at the same time, such as searching for documents in a specific language published before a certain year. Ultimately, it is not just a technical issue. It is a way of deciding where we want to inform ourselves from.