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Pretty bloody easy to find, I just searched for "trump claims he has biggest building in Manhattan after 9/11" https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-bragged-tallest-building/
Tldr it wasn't a callous lie, and it was pretty close to being entirely factual
My first guess for something like this would be your local library's databases, or Archive.org. 🤔
It's crazy how poisoned search has gotten over the last like ten years.
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.
Google also heavily enshittified search in 2019: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
tl;dr: The engineer who spent his life trying to make search good disagreed with the suit that pointed out, "but if people have to keep coming back then we can show more ads!"
Words were exchanged. Mostly "fuck" and "you" in that order. Money won.
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.
Are you familiar with the concept of signal-to-noise ratio?
Good information is probably still out there somewhere, but sadly it is bound to get increasingly lost in an endless sea of stupid bullshit and generative AI slop. The internet will probably never go back to the way it was before, and will instead becoming increasingly polluted with useless recycled data.
It's up to the rest of us to begin collecting and curating good data.
I don’t doubt that at all. But I hoped that searching with a date range limited to 2002 and earlier would turn up an article written at the time… but most all of that seems to be gone or in un-indexed archives.
Honestly I don’t know if anybody was talking about trump’s dumb comment at that point except the live news show he called in to
On sep 16 the LA Times posted an article about “NYCs tallest building, again” (The Empire State Building), and if they had caught wind of trumps comments they might have included it as being incorrect.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-16-mn-46445-story.html
it seems pretty difficult to find ways to bracket dates on search engines
Are you searching on your phone? I haven't used Google in a while, but it used to be that you could enter specific dates for custom search ranges on news articles - but only in desktop mode. If you're searching on your phone, try switching to desktop mode, then entering your custom dates.
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 was a TV interview though
Adding onto this for people who don't understand, Donald Trump saying stupid shit on Howard Stern was not front page news in 2001. He was a D-List celebrity. It likely received almost zero coverage because no one cared. He was just another dumb out of touch millionaire and people were more focused on figuring out what the fuck just happened and what kind of response was warranted.
This would be like if Sarah Jessica Parker went on a podcast during the early days of COVID to complain that she can't get shoes from her normal sweat shop. Sure it's a stupidly insensitive thing to say, but people have other things on their mind right now.
It wasn't even stupid shit, they asked him if his buildings were at risk and he said it was now the tallest building in Manhattan (true by number of floors, but 20 foot shorter than the true tallest) which is not unfair thing to bring up if you think terrorists are attacking the tallest buildings
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.
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.
I think as news sites update they lose some of their old stories. Internet archive may have what you want.
I've had okay luck with the internet archive for news articles.
News sites don't keep things online forever, even if they are still operating. I wish I knew that there was an industry standard and what that standard was. I'd save more things for myself knowing there was an expiry date.
I think that would be nice.
I think it'd be cool if there were a common standard for a "Paper of Record". A news outlet is considered a Paper of Record if it makes its publications public within a certain amount of time (say, 60 or 90 days after initial publication), keeps it available for a minimum amount of time so that archivists can copy it (ideally, provide a torrent), and don't modify the contents after they're published (appending updates is OK. Encouraged even, in my opinion). Maybe some other criteria I haven't thought of in these few minutes too.
There could be a torrent network of archivists, each hosting copies of news articles they consider important. anyone could join the network at any time and get their own copies of articles to host, maybe because a certain article is down to a few copies and they want it preserved. It would be a huge boon to historians I bet.
I just tried it, it has really spotty coverage from 25 years ago. I was only able to find a very few pages and even what it does have is just the front page kind of view. Nothing specific.
Who’d have ever thought that microfiche would be the pinnacle of our archival technology.
Librarians
I went to google.com and typed in "trump tallest building in Manhattan" and there it was.
This extension helps a lot - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nogoogleai/
All the articles I found of that type were current articles referencing what he said…IOW “Did trump actually say thing about 9/11?” “Video resurfaces about trump…”
I wanted the original text in situ from the day of. But maybe these will have to do.
Oh, I see!
Yeah the internet was a different world in 2001, hardly any of the websites from that time are still running and those that are will have rebuilt themselves multiple times over, often changing url structure in the process.
This kind of thing is just about my most frequent use-case in GPT. I find it generally very good for crafting complex searches, and it can go in steps, offering to search various types of archives as you direct it and redirect it.
The great thing is that you don't have to fish around for just the right words, as with traditional search engines. Just explain in plain language, and away it goes.
EDIT: Rock on with the paranoid, anti-AI downvotes! 🙃
I was searching for who said a specific comment about a book that Churchill wrote. I remembered the comment correctly but not who said it and where. So I asked the AI to see if it can find it for me. It did, right away. I was satisfied. But then I started to doubt myself a bit, tried to find the source but I couldn't. I asked the AI to make sure that it was suggesting the correct person, turns out, it wasn't. It even apologized, said "sorry, I was mistaken, it wasn't X who said it, it was actually Y!" and then I was again happy... For a second. I Asked it to make sure, perhaps find a source for it.. It couldn't. So I gave up on that, took out my copy of "Walking With Destiny" and flipped through the pages for like 4 hours and found the quote and who said it and where. The AI didn't suggest the correct answer at any point.
So yeah... AI might be good at times, but sometimes it just makes shit up for you. I still use it to find stuff, if I cant find it myself, but I ask it to find the actual source and give that to me, instead of just trusting it.
Yes, good points. Hallucination is common. LLM's have a bias towards hallucination and taking shortcuts. Part of why I always try to err on the side of simple queries, as well as ask for sources on anything that looks promising.
Also, different LLM's and different flavors of LLM's can fetch considerably different results. Google's built-in Gemini is still hilariously bad at times. Personally I usually use GPT, partly because it lets me program it in ways that stay global between sessions. Very helpful for getting it to stay on point and sober with the facts.
It's not unlike curating one's FV or Reddit feed-- you have to put in the work over time setting it up to best answer your particular needs.
