Google indexes web sites, so the information that they have would be
dated to when the contents were chached. For example if you google
'baseball' you will get a list of results. If you read it you will
notice that they have a date (all the ones dated were cached on 9 Oct
2005). The ones near the bottom aren't dated, but if you look at
google's cache, it has the date listed on it.
As far as the websites themselves. HTTP headers have a category for
'Last-Modified' and the same thing can also be done using a meta / tag
(however, this is rare and poor practice). Unfortunatly the
Last-Modified header it usually isn't useful for what your looking for
because many site generate dynamic content. (I can give a longer
explaination if you want it).
Ultimately it's up to the web developer to provide that information in a
way that make sense for the application. Blogs, for example, will
include the date of writting and possibly information on any edits
(ins and del would be useful for this). It's something that
usability people can push, but the w3 can't really enforce it in any
meaningful way.
Alan Trick
Vignesh Mathivanan wrote:
Hello,
I have a question that has been in my mind for a while now. As a novice
web developer, I frequently rely on the web to provide me with technical
help/guide on various topics to help build web applications. During
these occasions I find it increasingly difficult to verify the date of
last modification of the web document returned by Google search. This is
very important as the end user needs a way to ensure that those web
pages providing content on issues that change over time are up to date.
Is there a credible way of verifying this date or if not could it be
enforced by the consortium in future HTML versions?
Thank you,
Regards,
VIGNESH
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