Order results by age

Feedback and Developments
1

i use a lot of search engines, but i don’t recall seeing any that can order the results by age - i sometimes have reason to know what the earliest or latest mention of a subject is

i think gaagle had/has something like this, where one could view the history (graph) of the use of a search term, but even then this wasn’t available via their normal search UI

of course this info wouldn’t be available for all indexed content, but it should be available for a lot of it in the pages metadata

1 Like
2

This would be useful.

But, correctly identifying document dates is difficult to automate. So, even if the functionality were there. You might not get the results you want.

API users can refer to the date field they find most practical.

// Date last modified timestamp.
"timestamp":1184044740,

// Date last modified formatted.
"date":"Tue Jul 10 05:19:00 2007",

// Date published timestamp.
"pdate":1184044740,

// Date crawled timestamp.
"cdatetimestamp":1184044740,

// Date crawled formatted.
"cdate":"Tue Jul 10 05:19:00 2007",
3

i read that thread and i’m not sure the discussion there really applies to my suggestion

we don’t care about crawl/modified dates, only published dates - either the page metadata contains that info, or it doesn’t, and given that a massive amount of web content is generated by CMS’s which provide that information by default, i’m not seeing what the problem is

seems Moj could easily use that to order results by age, then list those which don’t have a pub date below that

maybe there’s something i’m not factoring that makes this difficult, i’m just not seeing it

4

Order by date carries with it some complexities, as you want some kind of measure of relevancy to be involved in the process so that you don’t just end up ranking all matches based upon date alone. You need a threshold for relevancy to be added into the process for it to work how you’d likely want it to.

We have the parameter datewr= which is used with a value in order to boost pages which are more recent; so &datewr=100 would give the largest possible boost. I’m sharing this in case it’s of interest to test out.

There are other issues with dates as we don’t always get page dates right, as discussed in the Operators post.