How often have you stumbled across a killer coupon or deal on the web, only to discover - sometimes too late - that the offer expired months or even years ago? If you're still counting, you might be happy to hear that a new meta tag from Google seems to be the first step in the right direction for combining and filtering time-sensitive information when searching.
This new meta tag, according to HighRankings, is called "unavailable_after", and it'll allow webmasters to easily instruct search engines to stop crawling pages after a specified date. This will be a simple and streamlined way for sites to ensure pages like limited-time discount offers or subscription-only content get removed from search results and caches on a pre-set date. In other words: you shouldn't have to worry about finding a 2 month old GoDaddy coupon that expired long before you even thought up the domain you're looking to purchase.
While this is a great step forward into the realm of automatically calculating the element of time in search results, we're excited to see the search companies further explore time and its effects on content and search because there's still a lot of work to do. Searching for something like game console sales statistics in Google and Yahoo! still returns popular links from 2003/04, even if the query is altered to "game console sales 2007."
We understand, however, that significant changes to our search tools and the ways we think about them take time (ba-dum-ching!), so we'll just have to sit back and watch how this all plays out.
[via search engine land]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-17-2007 @ 11:44AM
James said...
Hrm, that's a bit worrisome -- note how they mentioned "subscription-only content"? Sometimes, a newspaper or magazine will make an article available for a week, then hide it behind the subscriber wall. I like that you can still get a Google cache of those articles, especially when somebody has linked out to it but you didn't catch up on that particular blog until a few days later, after the time-limited freebie has expired.
On the other hand, not seeing expired coupons would be pretty cool... maybe they can make it an "advanced search" option to ignore the expiration-date tag?
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7-20-2007 @ 6:18AM
bugmenot said...
Whoever designed that little image that goes with the article doesn't know much about HTML meta tags. That wouldn't validate.
It should be something like
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7-20-2007 @ 6:19AM
bugmenot said...
Hmm, meta tag got stripped. It would be meta name=unavailable_after value=...
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