Penalize websites that fake their "last updated" date

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If you search for something like "https://kagi.com/search?q=How+To+Start+Mac+In+Recovery+Mode&dr=2", you will get a lot of websites that are very fresh - like in the last week. How convenient.

Most of these websites however, have their articles written earlier (some come with a publication date), and just I think they just routinely keep retouching their files so that they appear to be fresh/just in. Basically gaming the behavior of searchers that are looking for recent material.

For the example above, the second link is https://iboysoft.com/questions/?p=55, which has 55 pages of articles all from last week.
The third link is https://rainyweathers.com/how-to-start-mac-in-recovery-mode/ . If you look at the home page - the actual page is all about the weather in california, but it has an opinion section (https://rainyweathers.com/, bottom), which consists of a bunch of articles like "how to start a mac, how much does a beginner piano cost, baby girl names that go with bradley, best electric meat grinder for home use", all from 1st of june 2023. So that is also only there to drive clicks to the website.

Item number 4 I ignored. Item number 5 (https://setapp.com/how-to/reset-ipad) also seems to be a load of articles all meant to drive traffic to the website and hopefully continue to click on setapp and install the app.

I don't know how to summarize this, except that all these websites use common search questions and an article they copied from somewhere to drive traffic to their website/app. A common theme is that they keep updating the publication date of these articles. I don't know if Kagi has info on how much a webpage changed between its previous and current instance, but any website that basically only changes the date can go straight into the trash. The maintainers of that website don't care about the accuracy of what is on that webpage, so why would I want to read it?

MattZagaja

If there is an efficient way to detect this, I would strongly agree. I will also note the rainyweathers.com site, when clicking the main banner/site, started to hit me with a malware install page. If this can't be detected easily maybe these sorts of sites can be penalized by some sort of demotion across Kagi for sites that have lots of users that choose to lower/block them.

Vlad

This would indeed be hard to detect from sites doing this for legitimate reasons.

Instead we recommend blocking those and at one point in time we will start applying aggregrate blocked lists globally in some way (once we figure out how to prevent abuse).

carl

Vlad

we will start applying aggregrate blocked lists globally in some way

This is also a fine line to walk. For example, I myself down-rank or block some perfectly legitimate domains with good content, because they are irrelevant for what I'm looking for when I search and I don't want them popping up.

httpjames

For the malware site maybe Kagi could check results against a malware block list like 1Hosts?

Vlad

httpjames We are already using popular malware lists to downrank results.

carl

Both Google and Kagi used to display erroneous publish dates for most pages on my websites. There is no metadata or other information in the code to inform of any publishing date, so I assume search engines make it up on the fly or just put the last indexed date as publishing date. I update the pages from time to time, sometimes large updates and sometimes small updates, sometimes new pages.

If the search engine is to penalize domains that don't have the right publishing date, they need first to take care to get the publishing dates right.