Google is testing the concept of showing a date alongside certain results on its SERPs. The tests were spotted by Michael Gray (like two months ago) and by a WebmasterWorld member. Search Engine Roundtable quotes the latter:
In performing certain search queries, Google appears to be inserting the date of the page in front of the Snippet. I just performed one search and 5 of the 10 results had dates preceding their Snippets. One of them had the date towards the end of the Snippet.
Of the 6 dates shown, all were within the past 10 days with the exception of a Press Release from 2007.
Gray has posted a screenshot of his results:
There’s no question that when this feature becomes widespread, it will help users determine the relevancy of some results to their searches. Newer results are often more relevant than older ones. In fact this is probably the case more often than not. It’s not true all of the time though. Personally, I would like to see the ability to toggle between sort “by relevancy” and “by date” similar to the way Google News is set up. The newest is not always the most relevant. Listing the date is definitely not a bad idea either way. At the very least, users will be able to get an idea of what they’re in for without having to click on a result to find out it’s 6 years old.
Search Engine Land has also found that Google seems to be classifying categories of posts, with the dates seeming to be attached to newsy articles, and forum threads showing the number of posts along with the “last post” date. That makes things a bit more interesting. If they can do this with blog posts and show the number of comments along with a “last commented on” date, this could actually be a huge improvement for relevancy. Like I talked about in this article, the amount of user engagement is a pretty good indication of relevancy. The more people talking about it, the more people it is obviously relevant to.
Of course there are still going to be variables to that concept, like comment spam, and lack of good marketing. There could be an excellent blog post out there that nobody knows about because they’ve never heard of the blog. But nevertheless, the concept would still be beneficial to users to help them better choose which results to click on in any given search. I’m looking forward to seeing how far Google takes this.
