4 ms·

This kind of thing also makes the internet less searchable. I was trying to find some information on the previous activity of a cop who recently became infamou

This kind of thing also makes the internet less searchable. I was trying to find some information on the previous activity of a cop who recently became infamous in my area for beating and choking a man who was pleading for his life, to see if he had ever been in the news before. So I used the time window feature on Google, only to get tons and tons of articles published that same day that were backdated years because of bad change management. See for yourself on the link to a google search below, results are filtered between 2018 and January 2021, but every single article for the first five pages is about the incident that occurred two weeks ago, mistakenly backdated years. https://bit.ly/3xEpCGA https://bit.ly/3xEpCGA

tablespoon 5y ago
> See for yourself on the link to a google search below, results are filtered between 2018 and January 2021, but every single article for the first five pages is about the incident that occurred two weeks ago, mistakenly backdated years. Is that the news website's fault, or Google's fault? The first two links are to what look like keyword/topic pages with many articles, and it wouldn't be surprising of Google pulled a different date than what you're looking for out of such a page. Some of the other hits appear to be old articles with a "new stories" bar (not sure exactly what you call it, here's an example: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/15/trump-admits-biden-won-election-then-adds-i-concede-nothing.html https://boingboing.net/2020/11/15/trump-admits-biden-won-ele...). Personally, I don't consider Google date searching to be very reliable, IMHO. They're making a promise with it they can't really keep.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Personally, I don't consider Google date searching to be very reliable, IMHO. They're making a promise with it they can't really keep. It might work better if they searched on first-indexed date, rather than server modification timestamp headers or dates embedded within the page.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > It might work better if they searched on first-indexed date, rather than server modification timestamp headers or dates embedded within the page. But that assumes they index things in a timely matter, which is likely not true a huge amount of the time. And I don't think that would help in this case, because in many of the cases it appears they got the article date right, but the article page is dynamic and now includes snippets of stuff that post-dates the article.

tablespoon 5y ago

> See for yourself on the link to a google search below, results are filtered between 2018 and January 2021, but every single article for the first five pages is about the incident that occurred two weeks ago, mistakenly backdated years. Is that the news website's fault, or Google's fault? The first two links are to what look like keyword/topic pages with many articles, and it wouldn't be surprising of Google pulled a different date than what you're looking for out of such a page. Some of the other hits appear to be old articles with a "new stories" bar (not sure exactly what you call it, here's an example: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/15/trump-admits-biden-won-election-then-adds-i-concede-nothing.html https://boingboing.net/2020/11/15/trump-admits-biden-won-ele...). Personally, I don't consider Google date searching to be very reliable, IMHO. They're making a promise with it they can't really keep.

nitrogen 5y ago
Personally, I don't consider Google date searching to be very reliable, IMHO. They're making a promise with it they can't really keep. It might work better if they searched on first-indexed date, rather than server modification timestamp headers or dates embedded within the page.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > It might work better if they searched on first-indexed date, rather than server modification timestamp headers or dates embedded within the page. But that assumes they index things in a timely matter, which is likely not true a huge amount of the time. And I don't think that would help in this case, because in many of the cases it appears they got the article date right, but the article page is dynamic and now includes snippets of stuff that post-dates the article.