How Search works

Google B.C. helps you find what you are looking for on the web as it was before ChatGPT. Every result comes from before 2023.

All results are filtered with before:2022-12-31

Our approach

Google B.C. is not a new search engine. It is the ordinary Google search landing page with one change: whenever you press Enter, click Google Search, or search by image, the query is sent to Google with the before:2022-12-31 operator attached. Google does the crawling, indexing and ranking exactly as it always has. The only difference is the date filter, so pages written after large language models started flooding the web are left out.

Organizing information

Google Search works in four stages. The first three are Google's. The fourth is ours.

1

Crawling

Automated programs called crawlers visit pages across the web, follow links, and download what they find.

2

Indexing

Google analyses the text, images and videos on each page and stores what it learns in the Search index, along with the date it believes the page was published.

3

Ranking

When you search, Google looks through the index for matching pages and orders them by relevance, quality and context.

4

Filtering to before 2023

Google B.C. adds before:2022-12-31 to your query, so Google only returns pages it dates on or before 31 December 2022.

Why 31 December 2022?

ChatGPT was released to the public on 30 November 2022. The end of that year is the last moment the web was, for practical purposes, written by people. Google B.C. draws the line there.

What the filter can and cannot do

  • The before: operator uses the date Google assigns to a page. That is usually the publication date, but for undated pages it is Google's best guess, so an occasional newer page can slip through.
  • A page first published before 2023 and edited later may still appear, because Google keeps its original date.
  • If you type your own before: date, Google B.C. respects it and does not add a second one.
  • The Images link switches the page to Google Images mode. Image searches carry before:2022-12-31 and Google's custom date range ending 31 December 2022.
  • Search by image goes to Google Lens with the same operator attached as text. Lens matches images by content, so the date filter only applies to the text-based results it shows alongside the visual matches.
  • Nothing is proxied or stored. The page only builds a Google URL and sends your browser there.
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