3 ms·

I'm not convinced this feature was ever particularly useful. A lot of web pages don't have meaningful dates associated with them. (What's the date of the HN hom

I'm not convinced this feature was ever particularly useful. A lot of web pages don't have meaningful dates associated with them. (What's the date of the HN home page, for example?) Worse, a lot of pages which do have dates have incorrect dates -- either ones which are always current, or ones which represent a date that isn't relevant to the content, like the date a dynamic web page was first created.

riku_iki 3y ago
they can also use timestamp when page was first discovered by googlebot.
- WA 3y ago
  That is a bad idea, because some articles are updated constantly. I have one of them. Google bot saw it around 12 years ago for the first time, but I have updated and rewritten it a thousand times. This isn't journalism, where articles never change. It's providing current information about a topic and the URL is a shopping window – it changes.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    > but I have updated and rewritten it a thousand times. All the more important to be able to find out what it used to say at important points in time, such as the day someone decided to link to it.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    It's not a bad idea. It lets you reliably exclude results after a certain date, which is very useful for looking up old news for example.
lovich 3y ago
I used the feature semi frequently when trying to find data from a certain time period and being able to filter to only results that had a page unaltered from that time was very useful to filter out false positives. Sure I lost some hits like what was the front page of hacker news or Reddit at the time, but I’m usually looking for blog posts when I filter by datetime
senttoschool 3y ago
Google bot is really good at crawling new pages within days, sometimes much faster. Therefore, it’s useful because you can sort by approximate date of the content being crawled. It doesn’t need to be the exact date of the content being published. Just approximate is better than nothing.
paulddraper 3y ago
> What's the date of the HN home page, for example Today.
vintermann 3y ago
> A lot of web pages don't have meaningful dates associated with them All sites indexed by Google have at least one very important date associated with them: the date they were indexed, and by extension what they looked like then. And you can bet Google isn't throwing away this information for their own use. Temporal signals give causal signals, and casuality is extremely important for AI.
appleflaxen 3y ago
It sounds like it might not be useful to you. But it seems equally clear that it might be useful for others.

riku_iki 3y ago

they can also use timestamp when page was first discovered by googlebot.

WA 3y ago
That is a bad idea, because some articles are updated constantly. I have one of them. Google bot saw it around 12 years ago for the first time, but I have updated and rewritten it a thousand times. This isn't journalism, where articles never change. It's providing current information about a topic and the URL is a shopping window – it changes.
- vintermann 3y ago
  > but I have updated and rewritten it a thousand times. All the more important to be able to find out what it used to say at important points in time, such as the day someone decided to link to it.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  It's not a bad idea. It lets you reliably exclude results after a certain date, which is very useful for looking up old news for example.

lovich 3y ago

I used the feature semi frequently when trying to find data from a certain time period and being able to filter to only results that had a page unaltered from that time was very useful to filter out false positives. Sure I lost some hits like what was the front page of hacker news or Reddit at the time, but I’m usually looking for blog posts when I filter by datetime

senttoschool 3y ago

Google bot is really good at crawling new pages within days, sometimes much faster. Therefore, it’s useful because you can sort by approximate date of the content being crawled. It doesn’t need to be the exact date of the content being published. Just approximate is better than nothing.

paulddraper 3y ago

> What's the date of the HN home page, for example Today.

vintermann 3y ago

> A lot of web pages don't have meaningful dates associated with them All sites indexed by Google have at least one very important date associated with them: the date they were indexed, and by extension what they looked like then. And you can bet Google isn't throwing away this information for their own use. Temporal signals give causal signals, and casuality is extremely important for AI.

appleflaxen 3y ago

It sounds like it might not be useful to you. But it seems equally clear that it might be useful for others.