Here is a picture:

Both these forums support the functionality of labeling an answer to the question as a “top answer.” Google is clearly picking up on that, structuring the data as such and then displaying that directly in the search results.

This is all likely part of Google’s ongoing, slow and consistent effort of building out their semantic search engine.

Google has expanded this over time with forum sitelinks and listing the number of posts in a specific thread or blog post. This is just one more step in that direction.

Hat tip to Frederik Hyldig from SEOPORT.

Related Stories:

• Google Adds Visited Pages, Past Hour & Fewer Shopping Sites Filtering
• Up Close With Google Search Options
• Google Starts To Classify Content Types In Web Search
• Google Rolls Out Sitelinks Display For Forums
• Google’s Last Visited Time Stamp Gets Down To The Minute
• Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates

My companion piece, Up Close With Google Search Options, does exactly as the headline says. It will take you through ALL the Search Options that Google’s offers in great depth, including the new ones. But for those who just want to hear about the latest features, here you go.

Visited / Not Yet Visited Filtering

Follow the arrow in the screenshot below:

See that new section? It shows up if you’re logged into Google and making use of its Web History feature (see Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History for more about this).

When you’re logged in, you can select the “Visited Pages” option for any search to see only the pages that you’ve been to already via past searches on Google and related to words you’re searching for. You can also do the opposite — filter out any pages you’ve already visited for a particular search, so you can focus on new areas to explore.

More / Fewer Shopping Sites

At the bottom of the Search Options panel, you’ll see the results section:

This area features two new options: “fewer shopping sites” and “more shopping sites.” These do exactly what’s described. Click on fewer, and if you search results had too many shopping results, they go away. Think of it as the Amazonator. Like shopping sites? Well have more of them! Just use the “more shopping sites” option.

Pages From The Past Hour

As the screenshot above shows, a new “past hour” option has joined the existing date filtering choices of past day, past week and past year — as well as the customer date range choice.

Not enough for you? Our Hidden Google Feature: Find What’s New In The Last Minute Or Second covers how to drill down even more. But also see our What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article to understand why what you think is real time might not be — unless you disagree with my view of what real time “content” is. In that case, leave a comment!

Find Books, News & Blogs

Up at the top of the Search Options column links that allow you to narrow results to these areas:

• Videos
• News (Added today)
• Books (Added last week)
• Reviews
• Forums
• Blogs (Being added today)

The ones in bold are new. Books was added quietly last week. News was added today. Blog is supposed to be added today, so keep watching, if you don’t see it.

Forum Sitelinks & Trends OneBox

Along with the new Search Options, Google’s also reminding people about the new forum listings that it added yesterday (see Google Rolls Out Sitelinks Display For Forums) and the Hot Trends OneBox unit that’s been added (see Take That, Twitter: Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search).

And will there be more to come? You betcha, says Google.

“Usage [of search options] has been strong and increasing more and more,” said Nundu Janakiram, an associate product manager at Google, about the changes. “The steady increase in using the tool tells us we should try to add new and interesting features into the panel.”

What percentage of people use the panel? Revealing that data would cause the Earth’s rotation to stop, or the universe to collapse into a black hole, or — yeah, Google’s absurdly paranoid and won’t say. But I’m hoping they’ll loosen up in the near future. But they would say that among the options, the date and time filtering ones are the most popular.

Hey, that Up Close With Google Search Options article that I mentioned? Really consider reading it. It covers the things above in way more depth.

NOTE: See Meet The New Google Look & Its Colorful, Useful “Search Options” Column for important updates on how Search Options described below now work.

By the way, this is a long article. If you want a digest of what’s new today, then see the much shorter companion piece, Google Adds Visited Pages, Past Hour & Fewer Shopping Sites Filtering.

Using Search Options

The Search Options panel is available after you do a search. Look near the top left-hand side of the search page, just below the search box, and you’ll see a “+ Show Options” link:

After you do this, a series of options will appear to the left of your search results:

Selecting any of these will cause the results to change, based on the filter you choose. Not shown in the illustration above are the Viewed / Not Viewed choices, but those will be explained (and illustrated) below. This article will run from the top of the Search Options panel to the bottom.

Filter By Result Type

The first set of choices allows you to filter the results to show specific type of content:

1. Videos
2. Reviews
3. Forums
4. Books (New)
5. News (New)
6. Blogs (New)

Video Searching

Video filtering was one of the first three filters available when Search Options launched. Select this, and the standard search results are filtered so that only video clips show:

Note that when you do this, as the arrow shows above, you get new “Any duration” filter options that let you further refine the video results to show clips that are short (0-4 minutes), medium (4-20 minutes) and long (more than 20 minutes) in length.

Video Searching Confusion

Like getting video results? Confusingly, the Search Options feature means you now have two different ways to get them on Google, which in turn produce different experiences.

Look at the very top of the search results page, and you’ll see a Videos link in the navigation bar (the top arrow in the screenshot below shows this). This was rolled out in May 2007 with great fanfare (see Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide). Click on that Videos link, and you get results back from Google Videos:

You’d think that for consistency, getting video results by using the top-of-the-page navigational link should bring back exactly the same thing you’d get by filtering for videos using the search options panel. But not so, as I’ve highlighted in the screenshot above.

For one, the ranking of results is different. Using the navigational video link, I got a result on replacing an iPod battery that did not rank in the top results when getting video using Search Options. Also, using the navigational link puts the first video results within a blue border, making it seem like an ad, even though it’s not.

More confusion. If you search for videos using the navigational link, you can still open up the Search Options panel — whereupon you find options that are NOT available if you do a regular search and then filter by video. In particular, the navigational link enables different display options (TV view, list view & grid view), along with options to see only high quality video, to filter by video source site (such as YouTube or Vimeo), to see videos with closed-captioning and more.

There are even more filtering options available for video searching, such as to filter by language or file type. However, to get these, you have to use the advanced search page at Google Videos.

Review Searching

Another filter available at launch is the ability to get back what are supposed to be product reviews. I used the word “supposed” because despite the promise, you’ll still get occasional “review” that can be puzzling. For example, here are “review” results for ipod:

Many of the results lead to good review sites (I’ve marked these “Good!” in the screenshot above). But down there at the bottom of the page? Yes, the web site that will not die — Wikipedia. I always joke that it’s required by law for Wikipedia to be on every Google search results page. Perhaps it really is a law.

I can already hear Google spam czar and all around debunker Matt Cutts winding up a defense. “If you look at the Wikipedia page listed, you’ll see there’s a criticism area and a useful history of the models.” True, but it’s still not what I’d expect when I’m thinking product review.

Neither am I thinking that the manufacturer of a product — in this case Apple — should be listed (twice). I went to both of those pages, by the way. Neither had product reviews.

In the middle of the page, you get a big huge shopping results OneBox unit. Hey, I thought I was getting review listings, not shopping listings!

As it turns out, those shopping results do have a nice collection of reviews, like you’ll see here, gathered from across the web. In fact, those listings seem better than some of the “review” listings that search options was giving me. So why aren’t these pages listed like “normal” pages rather than being confusingly tucked in a shopping OneBox? Why isn’t Google perhaps showing a better display of these (mostly user reviews) somehow mixed or set alongside editorial reviews?

Forum Searching

Forum searching was the third filter available at launch. It works well. You do indeed get back matches from online forums and other places where discussions are happening. Still, I’ve got gripes:

Note that the VMware Communities are both the second and the third major listings. Sandwiched between them are three more VMware Communities threads using the new forum sitelinks display. That’s five listings from the same site in all, showing up in three different places. Surely there could be more consistency here.

Book Searching

Last week, Google quietly added a book filter to Search Options. Select this, and you get back matching results for your search from Google Book Search:

Note that after filtering to matching books, you also get new options to see “Full View” books (that you can read fully online) or to show either books or magazines. The arrows in the screenshot above point to these.

The ranking of results seems to match that as if you went to Google Book Search itself. What’s missing are the many more filtering options that Google provides through Google Book Search’s advanced book search page (such as by author or by ISBN).

News Searching

The news search filter was added yesterday. Select it, and you get back matching news results from Google News Search. The ranking and display is identical, as best I can tell, to what you’d get at Google News Search itself. The main difference is that if you search at the dedicated news site, the Search Options panel changes to provide additional date filtering options and the ability to filter to just news images:

See the year blocks, like 2008-2009 or 1980-1989? You only see these when using search options via Google News.

In either case, there are even more filtering options such as news source or author which only appear if you use Google News Search’s advanced search page.

Blog Searching

Blog filtering is supposed to be added sometime today. As it wasn’t live when I wrote this article, I couldn’t test it. I’d expect it to bring back results from Google Blog Search and for the Search Options panel to reflect some, but not all, of the filtering options at Google Blog Search’s advanced search page.

Date Filtering

Filtering search results by date is hardly a Google innovation. Many search engines offered this in the past. However, it never really seemed to catch on. My personal theory was that most of the time when people are wanting to filter by date, they want to have “recent” results — which means news results. In turn, that means they should be using a news search engine.

Another complication is that knowing the “date” of a page has long been a messy business. Is the date:

• When the page was first published as reported by the web server (sometimes these give out incorrect dates)
• When the page was updated with new material? (such as an article that was written, then perhaps revised months or years later)
• When the page was first found by Google? (which might not mean the page was actually published on or near that date)
• The “date” that might be listed somewhere on a page, such as near the author’s name?
• The “offline” date (such as if an old public domain article from the 1700s is put online)

In most cases, Google tells me the date will be when it first visited the page, though it will try to combine various signals to come up with the best one to determine a valid date.

Date Inconsistency

That sounds good, but it’s pretty easy to demonstrate how messed up the date identification can really be. For example:

The first listing says “Sept. 15, 2009″ but in reality, that page has been on our Search Engine Land site at that exact URL for nearly a year. So, the date isn’t the “first visited” date. If you go to the page, you’ll also see that it has content as of Sept 25, 2009 — so that isn’t a “last updated” date being shown. As for the web server, it spits out a date of October 1, presumably because the page comes from a database. Each time it’s requested, that’s the “date” of the page as far as the server is concerned.

This all means the date Google shows is the date of the last time its spider visited the page. If you view the cached copy of the page, you’ll see the date there is also Sept. 15. However, that’s misleading. The dates on Google’s cached pages can be days, weeks or even months out of sync with when Google last spidered a page to update its searchable index.

The second listing seems to use the date as published on the web page, the date displayed to readers, in order to inform them of when the page was written. But then the third listing ignores that and like the fourth listing, seems to use the last visited date. Then the authored date gets used again, then for no apparent reason, the authored date gets ignored and the last visited date appears.

Date Options

My Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates is an older article that goes into depth about issues with dates, if you really want to know more. But despite the fact that dates might not always be accurate, I’ve personally used the filter by date option many times to successfully narrow down results in a useful way. Nor am I alone. The date and time options, Google tells me, are among the most used from those offered in the Search Options panel.

The date options are mostly self-explanatory. When Search Options was launched, these were offered:

• Past 24 hours (results with a date in the past 24 hours)
• Past week (results dated in the past week)
• Past year (results dated in the past year)
• Recent Results (undefined — in one test I did, results stretches back to the “recent” year of 2002. I’m checking on this)

At the end of July, a custom date range option was added, allowing for pages to be narrowed down between a specific period of time.

Today, a past hour option was added, allowing you to find pages dated within the past hour. That not good enough for real time search junkies? Last month, the Omgili Blog discovered a way to narrow results down to the last minute or even the last second, if you’re willing to play around with the URL that shows up after a search. It’s easy and safe. Our Hidden Google Feature: Find What’s New In The Last Minute Or Second covers it in more depth. For the record, Google confirms they work and simply calls them unsupported.

I joked about real time search junkies, but in seriousness, I have a severe allergic reaction to anyone who believes that Google finding a page in the last minute or second means it provides real time search. For me, real time search means finding a particular type of “real time” content. My What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article goes into depth about this.

Finally, let’s have a look at all the date options in context:

The top arrow points to the narrowing options you have. But once you’ve selected these, the bottom arrow points to a sorting option. By default, results are sorted by relevancy. However, you can sort by date within the range you’ve filtered. Do that, and the most recent comes first. There’s no oldest to newest option, which would be useful, on occasion.

Visited / Not Visited Pages

To me, the new Visited / Not Visited Pages filter introduced today seems like a really useful feature. Assuming you use Google’s Web History feature, you can have Google filter out pages you’ve already clicked on from its results or feature those pages and hide those you’ve not seen.

For example, I was looking for information on how to add Twitter to Google Wave earlier today. I’d heard about a program called Twave, so started searching for it. By using the “Visited Pages” option (in the screenshot below, look in the middle of the left column), it was easy to get a list of what I’d been to:

Notice the two arrows to the top right of the screenshot. They point out how Google tells me when I last visited the page listed (me visiting the page, not Google’s spider) and the term I searched for when I clicked from Google’s results through to the page.

All’s not perfect, however. Notice the three arrows further down. Technically, I told Google to do a search for “twave” and then filter out only pages that I’d visited when doing that particular search in the past. So why’s Daggle, my personal blog, showing up? Look at the bottom two arrows. They show I last visited the page on September 12 for a search on “daggle email,” not on “twave.”

The answer is shown in the description. See how I’ve boxed and pointed at the word “Twave.” I wrote a post about Twave on my blog. Google visited my blog, saw that word and so considers it a page I’ve visited before for a search on “twave” simply because that word is on the page — NOT because I actually searched for “twave” in Google and found my blog that way.

I especially liked the Not Visited option:

I can think of so many times I’ve done a search, then realized I was “done” with some of the pages I’d already seen but kept getting them back when I searched again. That was the case this evening, when the pages I viewed didn’t really have the answer I wanted. I need to look at some more.

Unfortunately, most of the other ones I hadn’t visited because I could already tell they were junk by looking at them. Yet the only way to remove them from the Not Visited list is to actually visit them? Ugh.

An easier solution would be if Google enabled its SearchWiki feature when you’re using Search Options. Then you could easily delete pages you weren’t interested in. For some reason, SearchWiki isn’t active when Search Options are used (for more about the service, see my Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide article).

Finally, you’ll only see the Visited / Not Visited pages option if you’re logged into Google and making use of its Web History feature. That will have an ick factor for some people, the idea that Google’s watching what you search for and click on. If you’re among them, well, don’t sign in and don’t use Web History. All the other search options will work just fine for you. My Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History story goes into more depth about the Web History feature. Like really, really in depth. It makes this article seem short.

View Options

Further down in the Search Options panel are four ways to view your search results, all of which were present when Search Options launched:

• Standard view
• Related searches
• Wonder wheel
• Timeline

I’m not going to drop a ton of screenshots and explanations about how these work, because I’ve already done that in my Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Refinement Features article. Check that out. The only difference is in that article, the “Related searches” option was called “Search suggestions.”

Results Options

Just below the view options area are results options, like this:

It’s confusing, I know. Didn’t we have a filter by results area at the top of the Search Options section? Yes, we did. And isn’t “More Text” a view option. Yes, it is.

The “More text” and “Images from the page” options were present when Search Options was launched. They show longer description for results and thumbnail images alongside results, respectively. That Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Refinement Features article I mentioned earlier explains more about the options, complete with illustrations.

If it were me, I’d move both of these options into the View Options section. As for the other two related to shopping, I’d put them into that other results options area — the one where you can get news, video, blog results and so on.

Let’s talk about those shopping optons. They’re brand new: “Fewer shopping sites” and “More shopping sites.” I’m sure they’ll also freak out some site owners who’ve long suspected that Google’s wanted to decommercialize (if that’s even a word) its results in order to push businesses into buying ads. And in fact, to some degree Google admitted that type of shift back during the major “Florida Update” of 2003. Not to boost ad sales, of course, but because sometimes people may want less commercial results. Well, now you can overtly drop shopping-oriented sites from your results or conversely, pump them up.

Here are standard results for rollerblade speedmachine, which as you can see are loaded with shopping results:

When I apply the “fewer shopping sites” option, however:

Away go some of the sites, with the boxes showing where new forum threads or blog posts have come in. Shopping results are still there, though kind of sad, I noticed a good dependable store I use personally disappeared. I’d like the feature better if it removed shopping sites with less reputation, if it’s going to leave some in. But I’ve also not done more than a few tests, so perhaps this isn’t the case with other searches.

Wondering what makes a site shopping-like? Google says prices are one of the key signals. You have a lot of prices, you may seem like a shopping store. Google also said things that just look and feel like shopping sites will get flagged. If your using certain words frequently associated with shopping sites, or a format that is commonly seen, that can also be an influence.

Conclusion

Don’t see some or all of the new options mentioned? Remember that for the Visited / Not Visited options, you need to be logged in. As for others, typically with these types of releases, it might take a few days for everyone on Google to see them.

Overall, I like that the new options are more visible, and it may perhaps be reversing the long standing conventional wisdom that searchers simply ignore options when offered through “advanced search” or other links. However, it feels like Google’s been so busy growing the Search Options panel that it’s failing to maintain consistency with the existing advanced search pages for some of its vertical search properties. I’d like to see them consolidate and be more consistent.

NOTE: Google’s search options have been updated. See: Meet The New Google & Its Colorful, Useful “Search Options” Column.

Like other search engines, Google already distinguishes between various types of content. You can search specifically for images, videos, books, blog posts, and so forth. Google has separate search engines for each. But two recent changes suggest that Google is improving its ability to classify different types of content that’s gathered from ordinary web pages. Search Engine Roundtable points to a discussion on WebmasterWorld about the addition of dates at the beginning of some search results — something Michael Gray spotted in mid-September. From my personal experience, this seems to be happening mostly on content that Google can identify as blog posts and news articles — but not exclusively on those types of content.

And speaking of identifying types of content, Google Operating System points out that Google is starting to show special forum-related information in search results when it can identify that the result comes from a message board. Author Alex Chitu suggests this could mean new advanced search options in the future:

This new feature shows that Google is able to automatically classify web pages and to extract relevant information. Once Google starts to show data for other kinds of web pages, we can expect to see an option to restrict the search results to a certain category (forums, reviews, blogs, news articles).

The screenshot above has examples of both cases, the top showing dates in the snippets, and the bottom showing forum information.

For example, this is how Google has normally shown last visit dates for some pages:

Now some pages are getting a time stamp showing they were last visited within minutes or hours, rather than days:

You should be able to reproduce this yourself by going to http://66.249.89.147/ and searching for some news sites that Google is known to spider on a frequent basis, such as the BBC, CNN, and so on. Here’s an example for the BBC: site:bbc.co.uk. Postscript From Danny: My Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates article from last February covers how the various search engines show dates for when they last visited a page, whether it be on the search results page, on cached pages or through webmaster tools. At that time, Google was being inconsistent in how it showed dates for some pages and never provided an official, on-the-record explanation. Now it seems likely they’re trying to be more consistent and, in fact, may announce how they hit some pages within minutes. As Barry said, we’re checking on this.

Postscript From Barry: Here is a response from Google:

We are always working on innovative ways to improve our index and provide users with relevant information. What you are seeing is an experiment that we are currently testing. We run between 50-200 search experiments at any given time and based on user feedback, we may or may not develop new features and products. For more information on our live experiments, please visit http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html.

Google

When you do a search, some pages may show a date below the description of a
listing, as illustrated below:

I thought Google had long done this for certain pages that it revisits on a
super-frequent basis. And when I did a search for
cars today, I saw a date
like this coming up for the cars.com listing as shown above. An hour later, the date was
gone. I then tried that search again using a particular Google data center,
rather than whatever data center was assigned to my browser randomly. Doing the
same
search at that data center gave me dates again.

I’m checking with Google on how long dates have been showing and why they may
come and go as I saw today. I’ll postscript what I’m told at the end of this
story.

The example above shows that only some pages have dates. In contrast, the
Google Cache can
give you dates for nearly any web page.

The Google Cache allows you to view a copy of a page that is stored on
Google’s servers, rather from the website directly. (Don’t like Google caching this
for your site? Learn how to prevent it

here and

here. Don’t see a cached link option? Then the site owner is blocking
caching).

Going back to our search for
cars and the screenshot
above, you’ll see that the disney.go.com listing doesn’t have a date next to it.
To find the date the page was visited, you have to click on the link that says "Cached" under the description of that
listing. That makes the cached page load like

this. At the top of that page, you’ll see this:

This is Google’s

cache of
http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/cars/ as retrieved on
22 Feb
2007 14:34:08 GMT.

See the date and time, which I’ve put in bold? That’s when the page was last visited by Google.

FYI, before
September 2006, that date reflected the last time Google found the page to have
changed, not when it was last visited. In other words, if Google visited the
page in January 2005, then revisited it throughout the year but the page never
changed, the cached date would keep saying January 2005.

Since September 2006,
that’s been different. The date was altered to reflect the last time Google
visited the page — a good change to make. Google explains more about this on
the Google Webmaster Central blog

here, and Google’s Matt Cutts also did a video about it

here.

The options above allow anyone to see the freshness of any pages within
Google, one page at a time (as long as they are cached). What if you want to get industrial strength
and view the freshness of all your own pages at once?
Unfortunately, the Google Webmaster
Central tools don’t let you see the last time all your pages were spidered.
But that’s something they’re considering for the future. The tools will,
however, show you any problems Google had in reaching any of your pages and the
last time a crawl error happened for those pages. Using the "Crawl rate" option
found under the Diagnostics tab, you can also see a general graph of crawling
activity to your site.

There is one other type of date that you might see associated with
listings that has nothing to do when the page was crawled. Look here:

See the "3 visits – Feb 14" part? That’s coming from
Google
Personalized Search and shows that I’ve clicked on that listing 3 times,
with the last visit being on Feb. 14. My
Google Ramps Up
Personalized Search article from earlier this month explains more about how
Google Personalized Search works and can be disabled, if you don’t like it on,
as now happens much more often.

Microsoft Live Search

Microsoft Live Search operates like
Google. Some pages show dates next to them, as I’ve highlighted below:

As with Google, this seems to happen with pages that are being spidered
frequently, but I’ll check on this. Does a page lack a date? Then click on the
"cached page" link. When the cached page loads, you’ll see something like this
at the top of it:

This is a version of

http://www.pixar.com/theater/trailers/cars/index.html as it looked when
our crawler examined the site on 2/16/2007. The page you see below is the
version in our index that was used to rank this page in the results to your
recent query.

The date (which I’ve but in bold above) tells you when the page was last spidered.

Don’t see a cached page
option? The site owner is probably blocking caching. Are you a site owner that wants to
block caching? Visit the
help area at
Live and
search for "cache" to find more info. I’d point you to the right place, but it
remains impossible to link to particular pages in Microsoft’s absurd help
system.

Ask.com

At Ask.com, you can only get dates by looking at the cached pages,
similar to how that works at Google and Microsoft. Click on the "Cached" link that you’ll see
next to the URL of a listing, as highlighted below:

At the top of the page, you’ll see something like this with the date and time
(shown in bold below) that the page was last visited:

Below is a cache or saved snapshot of 

http://www.cars.com/  as we found it on February 19, 2007 1:24:56 AM.

Yahoo

At Yahoo, you can only get dates one way, through using
Yahoo Site Explorer. You’ll
have to create an account for your web site, then authenticate your account,
then you’ll be shown last crawl dates as I’ve highlighted in the first listing
below:

More than any other search engine, Yahoo makes it easy for a site owner to
see the freshness of many pages all at once. However, the huge disadvantage from a
searcher perspective is that you can’t spot check the freshness of any page you
randomly select.

The Date & Freshness Table

I love nothing more than doing tables, so let’s put everything above into a
nice one:

Ideally, I’d like to see that top row — "Dates Next To Listings?" — be
completely "Yes." Some site owners block caching, which makes it hard to measure
freshness. Putting the dates right next to the listings makes it easy for anyone
who cares to see at a glance if a search engine is stale or fresh.

In fact, I have to laugh. I’ve been asking for this for years. On the old
features chart I used to maintain about dates, I

wrote in 2001:

Along with the page description, some search engines show the date when a web
page was created or modified. As noted above, these dates may not always be
reliable. However, they do provide a useful clue as to how fresh or stale a
search engine’s listings are. Thus, search engines that show a date deserve
praise for doing so.

That was from 2001! Nearly six years later, it’s still the case that dates
aren’t being shown. In fact, it’s a reversal. Back in 2001, the major search
engines of AltaVista, HotBot (Inktomi) and Northern Light all showed dates for
all listings right within search results. Fast forward to today, and none of the
major search engines do.

The reason is simple enough. Over time, the search engines either couldn’t
maintain freshness or didn’t want to show they were sometimes stale. So dates
either went away or never got added. C’mon gang — time to bring them back right
into the search results. If they aren’t there by default, make it an option
people can enable.

Verifying Freshness

In the meantime, there’s a favorite tactic for those search watchers who want
to track freshness. Google’s Matt Cutts
once wrote
about this back in 2005, describing exactly a technique I and others have long
used. You simply find a page that you know carries a date that’s constantly
updated. Look at the cached page and see what the time and date says on it.

But Yahoo doesn’t show a date on cached pages! No, it doesn’t, but you’re not
looking for the date that the search engine inserts. You want the date on the
page itself. For example,

here’s the cached page over at Yahoo for CNN:

See the part I highlighted in red, that says:

UPDATED: 3:53 a.m. EST, February 26, 2007

That’s the date that CNN had on its own page when the Yahoo spider last
visited. When I looked, the date and time was 3:10 pm EST on February 27 — so
the page is only 12 hours old. Not bad in this case, but I wouldn’t expect a
major news site to be much out of date.

Return Of The Freshness Guarantee?

Finally, I’ll leave you with this trip down memory lane. Back in June 1999,
AltaVista once offered a freshness guarantee that was quickly broken. As I
wrote at
the time:

"AltaVista search is able to
make its Freshness Guarantee: no search site will have fresher results than
AltaVista."

AltaVista unveiled its first
"Freshness Guarantee" back when it relaunched in June, promising that its
entire index would be refreshed at least once per month. That guarantee was
almost immediately broken, as even AltaVista President Rod Schrock admitted
when we talked recently. "We turned our attention to this new system," Schrock
said.

OK, fair enough — they wanted
to build something even better. But this new guarantee has already been
broken, as described above. If claims like these are going to be made, then
they should actually be met. And not to meet them in the midst of a huge media
blitz is an incredible blunder.

Freshness is one important component to what makes a good search engine. It’s
not the only thing. Having fresh results means nothing if the results aren’t
relevant. And some pages don’t need to be spidered that often. But putting dates
next to listings is an easy form of search "food" labeling that can give
reassurance about a major search engines. Surely it’s time for dates to make a
comeback.