This function is similar to search_dates, but gets only the first date, and more suitable to shorts strings. It uses a brute-force approach, but has more predictable performance (at least on shorter strings - we limit the length to 100), and better quality in our tests, although still not perfect.

Not sure if it should be exposed in current form, but may be useful for future development.

NOTE: this PR is not worked on currently and free to pick up.

TODO:

• gather feedback on whether the API (finding the first match) makes sense? Maybe instead we could have an API similar to search_dates and make this a generator, allowing the user to stop at the first match. Although that would likely make the implementation a bit harder.
• Also what's about new vs old search dates? There are likely cases when old search dates works better in terms of performance or quality, and we won't maintain full backwards compatibility if we replace.
• clean up the API regarding languages (not sure if auto-adding 'en' and auto-detection is what we want) - that would require some test changes
• clean up the date cleanup code - it might be invalid for some languages?
• take care of the docs