Well fuck.
Just did a Google image search as part of some research into something in the medieval era. Well over half of the results are from some kind of ai image generation site. Argh. Totally useless for research purposes.
Search engines need an "exclude AI content" option.
@quixoticgeek I think it goes without saying, but the short version is: don't use search engines created and owned by companies who are currently spending billions on fake AI systems if you want results that aren't 90% guaranteed to be fake and false. Period. There are alternatives that don't.
@nazokiyoubinbou which alternatives do you recommend?
@quixoticgeek I imagine your comments are full of them. I've personally been fairly satisfied with DuckDuckGo, but I would suggest in regards to research it's better to try to find specialist things (Wikipedia, articles about specific incidents of the time period, etc etc) as much as possible.
Unfortunately, the Internet is being slowly flooded with gaff, and that is going to be harder and harder to fight against I admit. 
@nazokiyoubinbou actually no. Not a lot of suggestions for alternatives. And Wikipedia is woefully lacking in many aspects. I'm trying to find the right citations so I can fix some articles in the areas I'm interested in. But it's slow work.
@quixoticgeek I'll admit to you that I'm not a researcher. Mostly I just want to say that any company you see investing heavily in treating LLMs as if they were AI is going to be harmful to anything where truth matters. (Aka everything really.) I think eventually even alternatives like DuckDuckGo are going to be affected as LLMs flood the Internet with "hallucinations" and such. It may be necessary soon to do things the old fashioned way. But for now maybe you can find period-specific sites?
@nazokiyoubinbou a few people did recommend a couple of good sites for info. Which is good. LLMs are bad, and I'm trying as hard as I can to avoid them where possible.
@quixoticgeek I prefer to defer to others on this. I'm no expert on good research. That's why I avoided a specific recommendation in my first post.