There are a lot of bests where constraining a search to the last year doesn't make sense. While you may only want video cards from the last year considered for

There are a lot of bests where constraining a search to the last year doesn't make sense. While you may only want video cards from the last year considered for "best video card," throwing out all movies released before 2011 on a search for "best movies" would be ridiculous (unless you keep very up-to-date on your movies). Similarly, best apartments, best books, best recipes, and others benefit from a time-independent search. As google continues to improve, I wouldn't be surprised if this starts happening for some best searches (perhaps through monitoring what links users click on in such searches). There are also probably other keywords that could have a similar effect.