Ideally we would have Google hits from the day before a product was officially killed, but the past is, alas, no longer accessible to us
Google kinda, sorta, lets you search the past, under “search tools.” I think it filters pages by date of creation, but searches current text, so that “recent posts” type side bars pollute the results. And what is probably worse, it probably doesn’t return dead pages.
It doesn’t return dead pages, and the date-filtering is highly error-prone, I’ve found: while using it in searching for launch and shutdown dates, there were many ‘leaks from the future’, we could call them. (Articles from 2007 lamenting the shutdown of Google Reader...)
Last night I finished writing http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
I’d appreciate any comments or fixes before I go around making a Discussion post and everything.
Google kinda, sorta, lets you search the past, under “search tools.” I think it filters pages by date of creation, but searches current text, so that “recent posts” type side bars pollute the results. And what is probably worse, it probably doesn’t return dead pages.
It doesn’t return dead pages, and the date-filtering is highly error-prone, I’ve found: while using it in searching for launch and shutdown dates, there were many ‘leaks from the future’, we could call them. (Articles from 2007 lamenting the shutdown of Google Reader...)