Not just books. When searching for information online, for anything where things haven't changed significantly in the last few years, I definitely favour a post on SO/SE/HN/reddit/etc dated before 2023 over those that are later. And where there are no good looking references before that, the earlier the better.

Of course there are no doubt people out there realising that a fair few of us do this, and are starting to edit posts to pre-date them as a sort of SEO trick…

▲

golem14 6 hours ago | parent [-]

In this case, archiv.* might be your friend, since they have time stamped copies.

	▲	appplication 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That would somewhat work for some limited things for a limited time, but I feel like this is all just asymptotically approaching the inevitable conclusion that we cannot trust essentially anything online anymore because special interest (corporate, political, etc) have abused LLMs. I think near term this feels like something bad for individuals because we can no longer find truthy information. But longer term this is going to be an issue for the same special interests, as people normalize to this and longer view the internet or media as a place they can get reliable information. I really do not think children born today are going to think “let me just look up reviews for a product online” or even “let me just ask AI to summarize reviews” in 20-some years when they have purchasing power, because it will be ubiquitously known that nothing written online can be trusted, and AI is just ouroborosing itself (and a few more decades of increasingly desperate and short-sighted advertising/over-productization by the controlling corporations).