date in google results?

[pdstein]

While searching Google this afternoon I noticed that next to some of the listings there is a date - March 2, 2005 - and next to others there's no date. Does anyone know why or what the significance is? It doesn't seem to be related to when the cached version of the page was saved.

[bhartzer]

That date is not related to the cached version of the page, it's just the last day that Google spidered and the last day that they updated it. The cached page usually lags significantly behind the actual date the page was last spidered/updated.

This date that you're seeing is typically called the "freshness" or "fresh" date. Pages that are updated on a regular basis will get this added to their listing--and typically benefit from a boost in rankings because Google, like MSN, loves freshly updated web pages.

[jacobwissler]

Google displays two types of results: those that come from the "permanent" data base, and those that come from a very recent crawl.

If there is a date beside the result, it will be a date 2 or 3 days prior to the date you did the search, and will indicate the result you are looking at comes from a recent crawl, not from the "permanent" data base, although at some point it will be added to the "permanent" data base, which isn't really permanent.

[pdstein]

Thanks for the replies. That's interesting.