The Old Content

I am a search engine junky. Whenever I have a technical issue that I need to resolve, my first line of attack is to Google it. With an abundance of people sharing their knowledge and experiences on the Internet, I am confident that the answer to my question is out there somewhere.

Recently, though I have been finding I get more-and-more out-dated information. A while back I was searching for help with an issue I was having with Morae (usability testing software). One of the top results in Google was a blog post from November 2001. The post was in the blogger's archives and was a rant/rave about the features of Morae 1.0. As I skimmed this historic document, I became thankful that Morae has evolved. These days I fight occasionally with Morae 3.1, but it at least has a solid and useful set of features that its earlier incarnation completely lacked. While academically interesting, the post was useless in my current context. In this case, it didn't take too long to establish that the information was not relevant as the author had the posting date displayed the version number sprinkled throughout. Other times it was not so easy to figure out that the information I am looking at is out of date. As the web ages the temporal nature of the information becomes more important. When I'm looking for current information, I don't want to get results from the vast archives of blog posts, forum posts and news articles that exist out there.

It seems that Google was aware of the frustration caused by search results consisting of primarily pages with archaic (in web time) information. Now there is an option to filter search results by date. This solution is not very elegant. Most of the time I do not care the actual date that the content was created, but rather I care if it is temporally relevant to my query. Still I'm hopeful that the next time I need current information I will be able to find more up-to-date content.