You’re probably right about declining value over time.

Is that for personal use thoug? At work I’m routinely going through year+ old mails.

Yes, but that isn’t what I really use it for. An example recent use was to pull up a recording of a conversation I had on zoom to see a detail on one of the slides I couldn’t remember. Prior to that it was searching for a specific set of words I knew I had seen in a proprietary dataset (think Ipsos/Gartner) that their own search wasn’t finding.

I generally don’t need/recall those kinds of details after a certain time and will accept those losses.