Timestamps for search (pony?)

June 12, 2018 7:22 PM

Unless I'm missing something, there is currently no way to see how old a search result is on the site other than clicking on the post in question to see when it was made. Are search results ordered in chronological order, or relevancy?

E.g., in trying to search for recent threads on the net neutrality decision and subsequent updates, the search result page gives me plenty of posts, but at a glance I can't tell if one was made recently or in December.

Has there already been a previous discussion about this? (I could not find one.) If not, is this possible to incorporate?

posted by lesser weasel to Feature Requests at 7:22 PM (6 comments total)

It is chronological - newest to oldest. We can look at the layout and see if including datestamps would make sense, because that is useful info.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 7:23 PM on June 12, 2018

Good to know re: chronological!

And in case of confusion, because I just noticed it myself:

https://www.metafilter.com/search.mefi?site=meta&q=net+neutrality (no timestamps, logged out--this is the search result page I was referring to)

https://www.metafilter.com/contribute/search.mefi?site=mefi&q=net+neutrality (timestamps, seems to be default search results for logged in)
posted by lesser weasel at 7:34 PM on June 12, 2018

May I suggest you save that locally for your use? I've had links that were on Wayback a decade ago disappear for reasons I don't understand, and so the past gets erased.
posted by hippybear at 8:25 PM on June 12, 2018

I think we have MeFites who work at/with the Internet Archive who can comment with more authority, but my impression is that at any time whoever currently controls a domain name can place the robots.txt entry or set other signals requesting that IA not crawl the site (or just send an email making this request... not sure how that's validated?) and in doing so can retroactively take down crawls of the domain from public IA search results and availability, even theoretically the captures taken at past points when a different person or organization controlled the domain. But it seems as though doing this doesn't actually delete the IA records of those crawls and they still slumber somewhere, awaiting the copyright horizon. Thread from April involving discussion of web archive integrity. (So, to concur with hippybear, don't depend on IA crawls of a page to perpetually be publicly available.)

As a note about MeFi post and comment timestamps, if you look at the ID number in the URL and compare it with ones from active threads you can get a rough idea of how far in the past it occurred.
posted by XMLicious at 11:45 PM on June 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just use plain old Google for this, which shows timestamps:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=net%20neutrality%20site%3Awww.metafilter.com

You can also filter in the "Tools" menu by "Any Time", "Last Day", "Last Month", etc.
posted by meowzilla at 8:40 PM on June 13, 2018

Losing out on the convenience of chronological order with Google searching, but I suppose logged-in searches are the best option for now.
posted by lesser weasel at 9:14 PM on June 13, 2018