I routinely check the publication dates of books where technical information will have changed, and recently got quite irritated when Amazon mistakenly directed

I routinely check the publication dates of books where technical information will have changed, and recently got quite irritated when Amazon mistakenly directed me to the First Edition (2007) rather than the Second Edition (2012) of a reference book. In that particular case, the book was about the business and finance side of independent film distribution. Information on that topic from 2007 is about as useful as an article on optimising web servers from 2004 - there might be some useful stuff in there, but a lot of it will be seriously outdated and the landscape's changed beyond recognition. I also find articles on rapidly-changing technical areas to be essentially useless without time context. For example, I'll automatically discount any article about the more technical aspects of advertising on Facebook if it doesn't have a date on it. Advice that was valuable on that topic in 2010 is often useless or dangerous to your business in 2014.