I find this really exciting since it wasn’t that long ago that it might take 4-6 weeks for a Web page to get into a search engine. Google has announced that instead of showing a crawl date for search results, search results will show crawls by hours.

At least, it’s supposed to. I ran several searches on Google and GooFresh and did not find any instance where result pages were showing a crawl of x hours ago. Even a search for Official Google Blog didn’t bring me any joy. However, while I was running searches trying to find evidence of what the blog was talking about, I learned something interesting.

I wondered what kind of searches you’d get if you just searched for the date: that is, “August 16 2007” (at this writing.) So I plugged that in as a search. I got interesting results, but I was looking for fresh, recent content. Instead I was getting Wikipedia’s page for the date, some upcoming events and placeholder pages, and stuff like that.

So, thinking about how many blogs arrange their pages, and how they include dates in the URLs, I added an inurl: syntax to the search so it looked like this:

“August 16 2007” inurl:2007

And I got a lot of neat blog content, as well as lots of dynamically-generated pages (an unexpected bonus.) Very fresh. (Still didn’t see that new setup Google was mentioning though.)

And just so you don’t accuse me of being an ugly American — I also tried doing a search for “16 August 2007” inurl:2007 as well. There were fewer results, but they had a definite European/International flavor…

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