Find Publication Date of Web Pages In Google Search Results

While you cannot sort Google search results by date, there’s a new feature in Google that makes it easy for you to ascertain the exact date when a particular web page was published on the Internet.

As you may have guessed by looking at the screenshot, Google now displays the actual publication date of a web page in the search results pages - see example.

The publication date here refers to the day when that web page was uploaded by the webmaster / blogger on the web.  It can therefore be different from the day when that page was first spotted or indexed by Google spiders.

Some more examples of dates appearing in Google search results. This data is so handy because, with a simple glance, you can filter web pages that are old or published during a certain period.

Google is probably using the data available in XML sitemaps (or RSS feeds) to ascertain the publishing date of a web page.

That may be a reason why you get to see publication dates of mostly blog pages in Google or sites that publish feeds like Techmeme, New York Times, Twitter, CNET or even Digg.

If you like to see publication dates of web pages in Google that are not available by default, go to the advanced search page and select a time period from the Date drop-down (say ‘past year’).

Now when you perform a search, Google will display a date next to each of the search results – see example.

This is the day when Google spiders first discovered the corresponding web page. It may not be same as the publication date but always very close.