I think I understand a bit better the issue you were looking to address. I may have been a little quick to attack in this case, but feel Google is still getting to much of a free pass overall by the tech media. In a very real sense they are trying to monopolize the internet and impacting many industries without strong criticism (admittedly it is starting to bubble up).

I am a bit of a Tech news junkie and between GMSV and now Digital Daily, your blog has been my first stop for news since ’05. I really appreciate you taking the time to follow up.

Google supports this tag on their Google Mini server; I suspect they support it on their own servers, as well.

For database-driven sites, this should be an easy fix.

Daryl

If you feel I’m a Google fanboy, you haven’t been reading my work for as long as you claim. Point taken on Yahoo, although I disagree with your assessment of it as a “strong company.”

Now: I’m not saying that Google doesn’t bear some responsibility here; certainly the Google crawler could do a better job of contextual date analysis.

But …

… the Sun Sentinel is a news organization and an important part of any news story is the dateline which explains when (an where) the story was written. For example, the statement Tribune issued Wednesday blaming Google for the incident is datelined: “CHICAGO, Sept 10, 2008.” Got the dateline right on that story, didn’t we?

Now, Tribune argues that the UAL story’s missing dateline is immaterial here because its true publication date was evident contextually to anyone who actually read it. And I suppose that’s true. But to Google’s automated search agent, the only date that mattered here was the only date on the story it was crawling. And the only date on the story it was crawling was September 7, 2008. See for yourself. To reiterate: No date of original publication appeared on the story page on either chicagotribune.com or sunsentinel.com. The only date on those pages was Sept. 7, 2008. In fact, if you go back and look at the article itself (which seems to have been yanked from all Tribune sites) you’ll see that the body of the article doesn’t include any hard dates either. In fact, the only 2002 dates that appear on the story are in a sidebar featuring reader comments.

Ironic, isn’t it, that reader comments (and Tribune press releases) are datelined and the story itself is not?

Ive been a huge fan of your work for years, but it really seems lately that you have become a Google Fanboy as well as attack Yahoo unfairly. Who cares what Yahoo could have made in stock. It is a Kingpin for online news (number 1 sports and finance sites), email and a boon for blogs with Yahoo Buzz. The only thing Google has done well is search, and its competitors have almost caught up with them there. Yahoo is a strong company that isnt letting stock price dictate their decisions.