Google's search tools can help you find websites that have been tagged with particular dates. But be cautious; dates may not mean what you think.
I’m not sure everybody would agree that content before an arbitrary past date is automatically irrelevant.
Miscommunication, misunderstanding, and lack of information abound when it comes to the dates that appear on internet content. I’ll clarify.
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Dates and search results
Dates on websites and in search results can be misleading. They may refer to events like creation, updates, or minor edits, and search engines can’t tell the difference. Focus on content relevance instead. You can try Google’s Tools to refine a search by time but don’t rely on displayed dates.
Dates may mean nothing
There’s no requirement for webpages to have dates.
If there is a date, there’s no standard to define what the date means. A date could mean:
- The date the article was originally created.
- The date the article was last updated.
- The date the article last had a typo corrected.
- The date of the most recent comment on the article.
Any of those dates could be displayed on the website as “the” date for the article, and search engines don’t know the difference. This makes dates, even if present, meaningless.
If I open a three-year-old article that I wrote for Ask Leo! and make a simple change (even if only to correct a spelling error), then the date of that minor change could be the date my server reports to services like Google. Even though the article was written three years ago, today’s date could appear in the search results. That’s not helpful.
Dates don’t always imply value
As someone who provides solutions online, I find this scenario frustrating:
- Someone searches for a solution to a problem.
- Google points them at one of my articles.
- They note that the article has a date that isn’t “recent enough”, in their opinion.
- They leave…
- …even though the article had the exact solution they were looking for.
Website and content producers don’t want you to set aside or ignore valuable content based on dates.
Some content on the internet is evergreen. It doesn’t matter when it was written or when you read it; the information is still valuable.
Dates can be relevant
I understand that a date can be helpful for some kinds of content. That’s why all Ask Leo! articles have a date at the bottom. If I substantially revise an article, you’ll see two (or more) dates: one indicates when the article was last revised and another displays the original publication date with any intervening updates.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to give the search engines that information, and if there were, it would be abused by people trying to game the system.
However, there is a tool that may help you with what you’re trying to accomplish here.
Refining your search on Google
When you search for something, go directly to Google.com and then:
- Search for what you want.
- At the top of the results, you’ll see a menu bar. To its right, click on a button labeled Tools.
- In the resulting display, you will see an “Any time” dropdown item.
Click that, and you can restrict the results to the time periods provided. That may help you get what you want…
…except there’s still no telling what a date actually means.
Dates still really don’t mean anything
We don’t know what date Google uses for this function. It could be:
- The date Google originally found the page.
- A date Google finds somewhere on the page.
- The most recent time the page was changed by even the smallest amount (typo or comment).
- Something else even more random.
Google constantly searches the web for content to put into its indexes, but it’s not instantaneous. Especially with sites that aren’t getting traffic yet, Google may not check more than once a month or so. More popular sites (like Ask Leo!, thankfully) are usually scanned multiple times a day.
Do this
Understand that the date displayed or used by a search engine may have little to no meaning depending on what you’re looking for.
Instead:
- Don’t rely much on dates at all. Doing so may prevent you from getting the information you need.
- To the extent that you need a date, rely on what’s displayed on the page you find. Even then, take it with a grain of salt.
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In academic search, the date is very meaningful. After all, if say searching for income data, a six year old article is not very useful.
In cases like that, you can check the date after you’ve downloaded the article. And as Leo mentioned, if the search results did show a date, which date would Google display?
A date is necessary for anything that could be affected by information that is relative to the date it was created compared to the current date it is accessed. seems very rudimentary. Of corse if you are being paid because of someone opening or viewing it that would be a disadvantage. Follow the money!
Many undated articles are used by political groups, promoters of personal products, and sensationalist publications (Checkout ‘rags’) to promote their agenda and mislead (spin) information. For this reason alone the articles should be required to display an original publication date. Most links to undated articles are devised as ‘clickbait’. The attempt to sway opinion based on outdated or incomplete information may not be illegal, but is definitely unethical.
Unfortunately what’s to keep the original publication date from being inaccurate?
Any date is better than no date, because the article can be researched and scrutinized for accuracy and completeness for anyone who cares to do so. One undated article was titled “Court decision spells bad news for so-and-so”, but it turned out to be 2 years old and water under the bridge. The person submitting this apparently wanted to invoke ill will toward the person in question, and the unfortunate fact is there are people who blindly accept half truths and innuendo as truth. An original publication date would make them more receptive to the relevancy of the article.
Not so sure I agree with that. A wrong date can be used to mislead the reader.
As can no date. Good debate friends! I will keep reading Leo’s articles and commenting whenever I feel the need to exercise my grey matter!
You do realize the comment you are responding to is 244 years old :-) .
Is a misleading (intentionally or otherwise) date really better than no date at all?
I do an enormous amount of professional research on the internet. I feel ‘robbed’ when a headline/title tries to entice me to read the underlying article or publication that came out 10 or twenty years ago! And this is happening on a daily basis. No hard-copy publication ever attempted to omit its creation date, lest it forgo its legitimacy! This will eventually need to be legislated.
The matter of dating information presented on the internet is pretty basic stuff. If there is no reference to a date, this should cause alarm bells to go off. Move on to more relevant enterprises that take responsibility for there writings. The decent sources, and depth of information available on today’s web, provide a myriad of choices. One need not stoop to the lowest common denominator.
Simply ask yourself, why would any competent source want to create vagary, especially when it comes to “the when” !
I’m not agreeing with it, but the “reason”, as outlined above, is very simple: too many people rely solely on a date as a criterion for relevance. To put it bluntly, that’s wrong. The date is important, and an important part of people’s criteria determining whether the information will be useful, but it is not the only criteria. In my opinion it should be published, but I don’t fault websites too much if they choose not to. Some information is timeless, or sufficiently so, that a date all too often distracts the date-myopic visitors.
Having taught English writing, I’ve found that it’s not required for a website to have a publication date to be used as source material. I was surprised when I learned that.
Dates can be helpful on technical articles because tech changes so much. But, as Leo said, some article from years ago are still relevant.