I know it’s a small thing, and maybe not worth a huge amount of noise — but I have to say that I hope TechCrunch is right and Google is going to roll out default search that includes sorting by date. I don’t know why they haven’t added that as a default feature by now. Am I the only one who likes to see fresh results when they are searching? Obviously if it’s a search about 18th-century military techniques or something like that, it may not matter when the website was last updated — but if it’s anything even remotely current, then I don’t want to get sent to some site with information from three years ago.
I assume that part of the reason Google hasn’t set this as a default is that sorting by date to some extent interferes with the proper functioning of the Page Rank system — but I don’t know that for sure, so if you know something about it then please feel free to enlighten me. And yes, I know that you can sort by date using the advanced search. But most of the time I can’t be bothered. What I do know is that in most cases I would like the ability to sort by date, even if it’s a secondary process (i.e, sort first by relevance and then by date). So I would like Google to add this to my default search right now. Kthnxbai.
Update:
Mike Arrington says that according to Google blogger Matt Cutts, sorting by date as a default feature is not happening — which is too bad. Matt, could Google enable it just for me? That would be great.