If you use Google's advanced options to restrict the search results to a certain period of time, you'll find that Google shows the date when each web page has been first indexed (in many cases, this is a good approximation of the date when a web page has been created).
As previously mentioned, you can edit Google's URL to customize how fresh the search results should be. For example, if you append &as_qdr=y9 to Google's search URL, you'll restrict the results to web pages first indexed by Google in the last 9 years. Since this restriction should include all web pages from Google's index, you can use it to display the timestamp next to each search result (e.g.: a search for iPod).
Maybe in the future Google will display the date next to each search result, it will try to approximate the date when a page has been created, allow users to filter results from certain periods and sort the results by date.
Labels: Web Search
Bob said on February 9, 2008 7:59 PM PDT:
It looks like the date has more to do with the last time the page has been crawled, not the first time. Maybe if the page never changes, it doesn't bother crawling or indexing it again. For dynamic pages, the dates will always be fairly recent.
reading said on February 9, 2008 8:01 PM PDT:
Are you sure that date is the date it was *first* indexed or *last* refreshed?
I did a simple
site:http://reading.kingrat.biz search and added the parameter on at the end.
I'm pretty certain Google first indexed my home page before Feb 3, 2008. It seems more likely it's the last time Google refreshed the page in it's index.
Andrew said on February 10, 2008 1:26 AM PDT:
"Maybe in the future Google will ... allow users to ... sort the results by date."
I doubt it - they won't even let you see news with 'sort by date' as a default, though it's grindingly obviously sensible. They're date-challenged.
Well, it seems that if you use the site: operator without any keyword, Google shows the last indexing date. For all other queries, you'll see the date when the page was first indexed.
Example:
*
a standard search*
a site: search
Pascal said on February 10, 2008 3:03 AM PDT:
Is that new?
It must be new. Google only showed the date next to fresh results.
I did some more testing, but the system has flaws. I checked on the name of one of our companies, and Google gave as date somewhere 2003, while the domain was registered in 2005. See my blogpost about this. (in Dutch, but it's fairly translated with Google Translate though):
http://www.roodlicht.com/bug-in-googles-advanced-search.htm
@Rick: The date for my homepage is incorrect also. But the others are correct.
I did a site: search with the keyword "&" behind it. That shows just as much pages as with a normal site: search, but then with first dates.
TOMHTML said on February 13, 2008 9:59 AM PDT:
One of my websites has been created in
January 2003, the domain name then changed and was registred in
December 2004.
Google shows, for this "new" domain name :
30 Jun 2002...
