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.
Have you tried old sites that actually scan/preserve old newspapers? The moguls cannot scrub them words away as easily.
SEO and then AI
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
They’re actively killing it.
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.
Even has the audio, he was calling in to Howard Stern
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
He wants the original article that was written and posted in 2001.
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.
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.
I think as news sites update they lose some of their old stories. Internet archive may have what you want.
