My Google Frustration

I need more from Google. Not more results, certainly. There's probably too many of them already.

What I need is a better way to be able to search Google. I want to be able to ask for either relevance or time to be the driving factor in the results I see.

With the wealth of information available online, factoring in the timeliness of the web page results is key. When the Internet was young, this didn't matter much. There were few resources available online and relevance made sense as the way to measure the quality of the results.

This has changed. For instance, if I Google a product to find reviews or comments about it, I want to see the most recent ones first. Older ones might deal with an earlier version where all the kinks hadn't been worked out. Or if I'm looking for information on a particular subject I'm researching, I want to see the most recent stuff because it is likely to be more helpful than one that might be missing what happened the past few years on the subject.

Yet there's an inherent bias in the Google methodology toward older information. By focusing heavily on how many links there are to a web page (as Google reportedly does), it favors web pages that have been around long enough to garner that kind of attention. Now it appears that there is some time element involved since blog posts tend to dominate in many areas, but I want to be able to be explicit about the time factor and have it truly drive the results.

Certainly there are times where that may the most important factor. If I'm seeking information on the American Revolution, timeliness probably doesn't matter quite as much as if I am researching the history of the Middle East.

Google already has time components in Google News and Google Groups, so let's hope they're working on making similar functionality available in the core search results.