Prioritize article publish date over modified date

hmnd

Kagi seems to favor the article:modified_time meta tag over article:published_time when showing blog post results. This makes the ordering of results inconsistent and confusing.

In the below example, I searched for "KDE Gear". I would expect that the latest release—23.04—to display first, as its published_time is the most recent. Instead 22.04 displays first because its modified time is more recent.

In this case the modified time may be set by a legitimate modification of the article, but it's also commonly used by spammy blog sites to keep their content evergreen and always at the top of results, even if it may be outdated.

z64

Hi hmnd,

Unfortunately we're in kind of a weird spot with this one. When we ask our upstream indexes for time-ranged results, they do this based on modification time. So, if we were to show published time, and you did a time-range query with the filter, it would look like we ignored your filtered request.

We can try again to see if there is a way around this, but that is why it is like this currently.

Off the top of my head, maybe one idea could be:

Show "published" by default.
When a time filter is active, show modified time with "Updated ..." prefix in the little box to make it clear.

We welcome any additional ideas on the matter.

hmnd

z64 that's understandable 🙂. I like your idea of showing published by default and clearly indicating modified time. Perhaps the modified time could even be displayed as a small subtitle or something when no time filter is active too?

Funnily enough, Google shows the published date by default, but orders the results by modified time without any indication to the user as to why.

Chris

Yeah, I think just showing the publish date would be an improvement. I've had a few results that say "Today" in the search results, but the articles were published months or years ago.

carl

Would a simple solution like in this image below work?