You might give these tools a try. Not only are they designed to quash annoying AI slop spewed by Google, but they enable you to really tweak your searches in a way that you've never been able to do with Google. One of the things that they let you do is to specify the time frame of articles that you're looking for. So, say something hits the news and you remember something similar happened a few years ago, but all that comes up in your search results are pieces about the latest events, you can use this tool to block anything recent from the results.
