As per George Orwell’s 1984, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Hence the memory hole:
A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened. The concept was first popularized by George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party’s Ministry of Truth systematically re-created all potential historical documents, in effect, re-writing all of history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes were complete.
Well, the memory hole is here! I’ve noticed the date range filters have been disappearing from search engines. Here is an article about google intentionally removing this feature from mobile but promising to maintain it on the desktop, though it is hard to find. (I can’t find it at all on yahoo anymore.)
Google is removing the custom date range search filter for mobile users
Mobile searchers on Google will no longer be able to use the custom date range search filter. To access that feature, they need to go to the desktop version of Google.
One of the disadvantages of the digital information age is how easy it now is to erase history.
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