> Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the covers. He picked them off the shelf because (getting introspective here) he is a computer guy, and in the computer world any book printed more than two months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds that all three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one to Amy. [...]

> He concludes that these are all consumer-grade diving books written for rum-drenched tourists, and furthermore that the publishers probably had teams of lawyers go over them one word at a time to make sure there would not be liability trouble. That the contents of these books, therefore, probably represent about one percent of everything that the authors actually know about diving, but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors don't even mention that. [...]

> Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been published within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on the back cover containing the words stunning, superb, user-friendly, or, worst of all, easy-to-understand. He looks for old, thick books with worn-out bindings and block-lettered titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.

-- Neal Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_

Tech is just one subject, there are lots of others which don't change as fast. And for tech you can define a search alias which defaults to the past year, for example, if you work in a field which changes very fast.

With facebook groups people ask the same questions again and again, because the search is awful.

Search engines already have a fresh content bias but at least all content is indexed. With silos, especially Facebook, after a day or two on an active group a post just disappears

Content disappears off of Google as time goes on, too.

Depending on the domain you're interested, this may or may not be important. I work on old Toyota 4x4's, and frequently refer to old forum posts. The details on a brake job for a 4Runner aren't going to change, ever, so this is fine.

That's the difference between software and hardware however, hardware is 'hard' to change, easy to swap out and replace.

I totally agree with you about how the details on changing or upgrading truck components are not mutable as the example below shows, that parts conversion is compatible from 1196-2002 series cars, you can't say 19xx to 20xx computers, nowhere close.

Example link: https://www.toyota-4runner.org/3rd-gen-t4rs/275451-resources...

That's not an argument for throwing away the ability to search old information though. It's an argument for better metadata and better easy control over the search range. I may be looking for old information.

Yes, if I'm searching on a current tech topic or to solve some computer issue I'm having, I probably don't want anything more than a year or two old. However, I frequently want to research some historical content and it can be really hard to cut through the recency bias of search engines.