[madars]

Date displayed in Google Search results is often the self-described date from the document itself. Take a look at this "FOIA + before Jan 1, 1990" search: https://www.google.com/search?q=foia&tbs=cdr:1,cd_max:1/1/19...

None of these documents were actually published on the web by then, incl., a Watergate PDF bearing date of Nov 21, 1974 - almost 20 years before PDF format got released. Of course, WWW itself started in 1991.

Google Search's date filter is useful for finding documents about historical topics, but unreliable for proving when information actually became publicly available online.

[littlestymaar]

Are you sure it works the same way for documents that Google indexed at the time of publication? (Because obviously for things that existed before Google, they had to accept the publication date at face value).

[madars]

Yes, it works the same way even for content Google indexed at publication time. For example, here are chatgpt.com links that Google displays as being from 2010-2020, a period when Google existed but ChatGPT did not:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Achatgpt.com&tbs=cdr%3...

So it looks like Google uses inferred dates over its own indexing timestamps, even for recently crawled pages from domains that didn't exist during the claimed date range.