Hi!

I’m very careful to ensure that everything I share here on Now I Know is true — or, I guess, something that has been reported on by quality, verifiable sources. You’ll see this when you read my stories. I almost always cite and link to my sources, (e,g., saying “as reported by the New York Times” or “per the BBC”) because I want you to know that what I’m relaying has come from a place with professional reporters who typically abide by high journalistic standards. Sometimes, it’s easy for me to find those sources, but not always — sometimes, I have to dig pretty deep. I’ve gotten good at that, though; I’ve written Now I Know for more than 15 years now, and I know how to run Google searches and leverage other tools to find credible, reliable reporting.

But it’s getting harder, and I don’t think that’s my fault.

Google search just isn’t as good as it used to be. A few years ago, Google changed its search algorithm to give more recent sources higher priority. That was a problem for me because I’m often relating old stories to modern news, and the modern ones were burying the older sources to a point beyond where I could discover them. I invested in a Newspapers.com subscription to account for that, and it’s been great, but I also wish I could tell Google to ignore things that happened in the most recent six months or so — sometimes, you don’t want to prioritize what Google termed “freshness.” But again, that was manageable.

The more recent changes aren’t as manageable. Google’s results are polluted with all sorts of generative AI junk — Google has pivoted toward giving you the right answer to your question, not a list of websites that have more information. As Ernie Smith wrote in his excellent newsletter, Tedium, “If you’re using Google to actually find websites rather than get answers, it $!@(&!@ sucks.” (Smith offers a cool solution, though — an AI-overview-free version of Google, udm14.com, which I really need to remember to use more often.)

Even if you strip out the AI-powered answer machine from Google, it’s still pretty bad. Publishers are cranking out low-quality information that is duplicative of the low-quality information already out there, and that’s further polluting the results. Social media posts sharing viral stories without verifying any of the details around those stories also litter the results. When I went to find credible sources for yesterday’s story about the good Samaritan who intentionally caused a car crash, I Googled his name and the word “car,” expecting something useful to pop up. Instead? A reddit post, some blog posts from Medium, a few Instagram posts, a Daily Mail article (and the Daily Mail isn’t reliable at all), and a bunch of sites that are ostensibly news sites, but the stories are mostly just embedded tweets sharing reactions to other people’s tweets. There’s no actual reporting, and no interviews with the driver.

It’s frustrating. But there’s a solution I wasn’t expecting: ChatGPT.

Generative AI, when it comes to web searching, is rather strong because you can give it parameters. I asked it the following: “Help me find a news story in English about Henry Temmermans intentional car crash, ideally from a major publication.” It told me, effectively, that it couldn’t do it:

I wasn’t able to find any coverage of Henry Temmermans’ dramatic intervention in English from a globally recognized news outlet (such as the BBC, Reuters, AP, or The New York Times). Most of the online English reports—such as in Big World Tale, InspireMore, KODJ, and InEntertainment—are local or human‑interest platforms rather than major journalistic publications.

Yeah, that won’t fly. But then I asked it to search reputable/major Dutch sources, a language I don’t speak. And it found a handful. I was only able to write yesterday’s story because I was able to find these Dutch sources. Instead of just tossing keywords into Google, I put parameters into ChatGPT, and got the results I was looking for.

I don’t know if this shift from keyword-based search to more nuanced, parameter-based search is a good thing. The former required that you verify the information behind the search results — all you were given was a list of links, not an “answer,” so you needed to click into the sources to find the information you wanted. Now, the information is presented as the answer, and most people are going to trust without verifying that the gen AI bot has the answer right. I won’t fall victim to that because my entire purpose here is to find reliable information, and these search/generative AI engines aren’t reliable — they’re only as good as the data fed to them. But how we find information online has fundamentally changed, and I think it’s important to be mindful of that.

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: A Knit Little Retirement Hobby: The supercentenarian who made sweaters for penguins.

Tuesday: Which Killed First, the Chicken or the Egg?: The drunk, actually. He wasn’t a chicken, but he was a fool. And congrats to everyone who wrote to me to share that they noticed my reference to The Hobbit.

Wednesday: A Noid, Annoyed: The downfall of a corporate mascot.

Thursday: Crashing a Car to Save a Life: Cars: Wrecked. Drivers: Basically okay. That’s the important part.

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “The Last Days of the Rainbow Warrior” (Slate, 41 minutes, July 2025). The subhead: “Four decades ago, a secret government team had a target—and a plan. It turned into one of the most sensationally botched crimes of the century.”

2) “A ‘Grand Unified Theory’ of Math Just Got a Little Bit Closer” (Wired, 9 minutes, July 2025). High-level — like Ph.D.-level — math is so far beyond what you learn in high school, it might as well be its own language. You’ll still understand this, though!

3) “The First Soda in Space: When NASA Got Caught Up in the Cola Wars” (New York Times/gift link, 17 minutes, July 2025). Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” came out in 1989, and the last non-chorus lyric in the list of historical-ish stuff is “rock and roller, cola wars, I can’t take it anymore.” You probably know what rock and roll is, but “cola wars”? Here’s that story.

Have a great weekend!

Dan