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Yep. Also, the days of the "Advanced Search" page have passed, but Google still has time range options under the "Tools" button near the top of the results pag
by jpk 3y ago
Yep. Also, the days of the "Advanced Search" page have passed, but Google still has time range options under the "Tools" button near the top of the results page. If they're giving the user the option to filter results by time, then it's pretty goofy for the algorithm to de-rank a site in results where the the default of "Any time" was selected in the query just because the site has old articles in the index.
- ajmurmann 3y agoI'm afraid that, as so often with any topic, the vast majority of users never or rarely uses the time filter and so everything gets optimized for the users to dumb to search properly.
- jpk 3y agoIn this case I'm not too keen on blaming users for this when the option is sorta buried in the current design. The Tools button isn't prominent, the current value of the time range option is completely hidden when it's on the default of "Any time", and the search query doesn't change if you alter the time range option. (And, to my knowledge, there's not a search query incantation for specifying the time range.) If the current UI is a reflection of what PMs at Google want users to do, then they don't really care if the user uses, or even knows about, the option to filter by time. So I don't think it flies to point at the user and say, "you're holding it wrong".
- codeflo 3y agoOr perhaps more likely: Giving users a more prominent way to filter by time didn’t improve ad clicks and was thus A/B tested out of the product. Just like it was A/B tested that the best background color to contrast the ad area against the organic results’ #ffffff is #fffffe.