July 2004 Archive

Cache Date Back in Google

Back in the depths of Google's history, their cached copy of Web pages included two dates: the date when Google crawled the page and the reported date stamp on the page at that time. Then, both dates disappeared as Google realized that they showed how old some parts of their database was. Now that they have greatly increased the freshness of their database and revisit more pages more frequently, they have finally added back some date information. The top line in the cache now gives the date Google last crawled the page. It is a welcome and useful addition.

New Option for Define in Google

To get a Google Glossary definition used to require using either the define: prefix or just adding a define in front of a query term. Now it will also appear when "What is" precedes a term.