Is there a way to "reverse time" on a google search?

This is inspired by the Kavanaugh hearings, but see the forum. I personally had never heard of the terms like “boofing” or “devil’s triangle” prior to the hearings. If I want to try to look it up now, every google hit will return to the Kavanaugh hearings and the political talking points.

Is there a way on google or any other search engine to reverse the time to say, June 1, 2018, and have the search results based upon what would have been shown at that time frame? Or perhaps, barring that, returning only those documents published prior to that?

I think there is…but IIRC it’s buried pretty deep.

ETA, it wasn’t as hard to find as I thought it would be. Do your search, then at the top where it says All, Videos, Images etc, click on Tools, then “Any Time” and you can set a custom date range.

I think it’s setting it to chronological order that’s harder to find.

Also, I don’t know for sure, but it’s possible that articles written in that time frame but updated receently could still get caught in your search, but this should get you a good start. Doing a search for boofing for just that day only yielded a handful of hits, which I think is what you’re looking for.

There’s no way to set a search engine back to ‘what it would have returned on a specific date’, because that would require them keeping a huge bunch of backup information. You can do what Joey P said and only return results that are flagged for a certain time range. It’s not 100% accurate, as old stories sometimes get a more recent date when the page holding them is updated, but it does a pretty good job at filtering out the recent stuff.

Waybackmachine and Google Cache seem to keep vast amounts of old websites.

“Boofing”, I believe refers to anal sex and is a corruption of “butt ----ing.” I’d never hear the term “Devil’s Triangle” in a sexual context. I have heard it as a synonym for the “Bermuda Triangle” and then there’s this.

When exactly was BK at Yale? This game came out in the eighties.

Neither one of them keeps a day to day snapshot of the websites though, I know the Wayback machine sometimes gets several snapshots of a site in a year, then skips it for years. And the search indexes for google are not public to where something like wayback machine could snag them, and whatever backups google takes of their own data center are not stored in a form that they would have a snapshot of their search crawling results for each day where they could be used to do a search. I’m pretty confident that there’s no way to get the actual ‘exactly what would google have returned on X date’ result without convincing someone at google to restore a bunch of data from ‘tape’ for the search.

I assumed (wrongly, possibly) that it’s another term for a Devil’s Threeway. I could understand why he’d lie about having an orgy/threeway. OTOH, it would be pretty easy to show he made up the drinking game part of it if he couldn’t produce the other person/people he played with and if it’s a threeway, there’s at least two other people involved.

This doesn’t directly answer your question about Google but there’s been a link going around FB to r/boofing on Reddit that has posts several years old. It could be considered NSFW so I’m posting the link in spoiler tags. In these threads they use the word “boofing” to refer to inserting recreational drugs anally.

If you search through Google News, you can specify date ranges in the Advanced settings. But it only provides news results (for a fairly wide definition of “news”).

You can also enter your query and put -kavanaugh or -“brett kavanaugh” to tell the Google to not return results with either of the phrases. The first one simply says, “Don’t return results containing ‘kavanaugh’”, and the second one, surrounded by quotes, will not return any results that contain “brett kavanaugh”.

Not quite the same thing as a date search, but certainly useful if you want to eliminate a whole swath of results.

The way it was explained to me a decade+ ago by an associate who also happened to be a frat bro type in college:

A man being given oral sex by a woman and another man at the other end of the woman: The two men give a high-five to each other and complete the devil’s triangle.

Many of the acts described in this thread are now referred to as Kavanaughing.

No, that’s only when you lie about it afterwards.

[Moderating]

While the Kavanaugh case shows up in the context of this question, the question itself is about the features of Google or other search engines. If you want to talk about how to search for such things, this is the place. If you want to discuss the meaning of terms like “devil’s triangle” or “boofing”, then a separate thread in IMHO or GD would be better.

Sorry, thought that I was getting at the underlying basis for his question. It is a fine question independent of that but it does seem that the reason for him asking it was to get at the meanings of certain terms and I was only trying to help.

Yes. On the right-hand side, below the search box in Google is a button that says Tools. Selecting it shows a series of time selection options on the left a line below, where the search results number shows up.

That was my intention and perhaps I did not present it well.

Thank you, but as I said, my question was only an example and I did not mean to rehash the Kavanaugh debate. I only wanted to know for this Kavanaugh instance, or for any future instance, or even a historical debate about a term like, for example “that sucks” so we can isolate how it was used in years past. Again, thanks for your contribution.