Handling temporal information in web search engines

Abstract

The Web can be considered a vast repository of temporal information, as it daily receives a huge amount of new pages. Generally, users are interested in information related to a specific temporal interval. In the information retrieval area, researches have newly incorporated the temporal dimension to the search engines. This paper presents a comprehensive study that describes the evolution of search engines on the exploitation of temporal information. Research directions and future perspectives are also presented, considering the authors' point of view.

Survey of Temporal Information Retrieval and Related Applications

“…With the growth of research in temporal information retrieval, search engines have started to exploit time to improve their search processes. The first initiative, as pointed out by [Manica et al 2012], which is still used today, pushed the most recent web pages to the top list of the results by freshness metrics that take into account the document timestamp (publication time or last-modified date). This approach is usually used by traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing in news domains or with spike phenomena, which tend to lose interest as time goes by.…”