SearchDay - It's Tough to Get a Good Date with a Search Engine - 5 June 2002 By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor June 5, 2002 by Gary Price and Genie Tyburski, Guest Writers Search engines have problems with calendar information. Bottom line: you may end up searching for dates in all the wrong places. Searchers remark from time to time on the odd results of a date restricted query. For example, several weeks ago a lawyer commented that he had performed "a [Google] search for anything containing [his] name with the restriction 'last year' and got at least one hit that was probably 5+ years old." The next day, TVC Alert mentioned: canada career canada career "[W]hen restricting a query by date, you are searching the date the engine indexed (or re-indexed) the Web page, rather than the date of the Web page itself." But a closer look at date restricted searching, uncovers quirks that defy this simple explanation. This article focuses on date searching at Google, but searchers should note that other engines - like AlltheWeb and AltaVista - provide similar advanced features. The issues we raise occur regardless of the engine used. Google offers three date searching options via its advanced search page. It defines the date qualifier as one that allows you to "restrict your results to the past three, six, or find people by phone number canada career twelve months." In conventional online research systems, as well as in Google Groups (separate service for posting and querying Usenet messages), date qualifiers retrieve material published or created on, before, or after a certain date, or within a date range. But what is a date on the Web? HTML provides no code for identifying the creation or publication date of Web pages. While a meta tag exists, few use it. Moreover, search engines generally ignore data contained within this meta tag. A date in this environment may have other meanings. There are revision dates, expiration dates, as well as crawl and indexing dates. Which of these, for example, causes Google pictures of missing children canada career to retrieve
