I still couldn’t find the time and motivation to even start writing a blog post about the so-called AI, but I want to share a one-off experience I just had while searching for a ten-year-old article on the web.

■ We all know that all search engines have become dumber and dumber. Searching for results far in the past doesn’t show anymore the results that we know they should still be there. Or maybe they aren’t anymore. Typically, results from before about 2012 are increasingly rare. Maybe those websites aren’t online anymore, especially if they were on paid hosting. Even if they were newspapers or other mainstream media, in many cases older content was lost upon the restructuring of the site. But even when the content is still there, search engines favor recent results.

Google Search allows you to specify any date interval. But it just couldn’t find what I was looking for.

In Bing, to set a custom date range, you have to navigate in the past one month at a time. It’s impossible to skip by full years, and manually entering of dates is also impossible. Too many clicks.

Yahoo Search only allows you to refine by date this way: Anytime, Past day, Past week, Past month.

Startpage offers these options: Any time, Past 24 hours, Past week, Past month, Past year.

I don’t use DuckDuckGo anymore. I never ever liked it. No chemistry.

Pure Idiocracy.

■ Eventually, I found the results through Kagi, after having failed to get anything relevant from ChatGPT, Mistral, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. Mistral was somewhat closer to the facts than ChatGPT, but it was hallucinating; still, it helped me to an extent. Perplexity, Claude and Gemini were completely retarded.

I couldn’t find the exact article I was looking for, but a similar one. The fact that Kagi managed to find it proves that Google should have been able to, but it’s so dumb lately that I can’t even. And Kagi isn’t usually that much of a help (it’s subscription-based, too!).

RIP web search.

■ Oh, wait! I stopped using Copilot since it got dumbified. And yet, I just asked it, and it gave me the correct answer right away, without needing to further help it! Amazing. Its UI is dumber, but under the hood things might be different.

Q: There was a case of a high official in Russia tasked with the fight against corruption. He was arrested and jailed, and eventually committed suicide. Name?

A: The official you’re referring to is Boris Kolesnikov, a former deputy chief of the Anticorruption and Economic Crimes Directorate at Russia’s Interior Ministry. He was arrested and charged with organizing a criminal group and soliciting bribes. Tragically, he committed suicide in June 2014 while in pretrial detention.

Is there anything else you’d like to know about this case or related topics?

The provided link wasn’t that great. The article I previously obtained via Kagi, while not knowing the name of the person, was much better: The New Yorker: Death of a Russian Cop (barrier-free copy). Of course, the retarded SEO techniques used by these journos made the browser’s title “Death of a Russian Cop” (the TITLE HTML tag), but the actual article’s title is “The Double Sting” (which is an H1 HTML tag). To me, this seems as anti-SEO, and it should downrank the page as being inconsistent, but the motherfuckers who develop the search engines are as brainfucked as the shitheads who use such “techniques.”

■ There was also some other story, with a wider single-column layout and a larger lead photo, which mentioned his wife’s testimonials, if I remember correctly. I stopped searching for it. Maybe it’s gone for keeps. Either way, the story in The New Yorker is just fine as well.

But web search is not. As for the LLM AI engines, I still don’t know what to believe. (My temporary conclusions require a long post that has to wait.)

■ OK, what the heck. Full disclosure:

  • ChatGPT gave me: Dmitry Zakharchenko, Alexander Kolokoltsev, Mikhail Abyzov, Alexander Khoroshavin, Viktor Isayev.
  • Mistral gave me: Dmitry Zakharchenko, Denis Sugrobov.
  • Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity gave me: Aleksei Navalny.
  • Copilot gave me: Boris Kolesnikov.

Sugrobov and Kolesnikov were both arrested, and the story involves both of them.