Dammit, just put the date somewhere next to the title when writing an article. It's amazing how much context might be missing if there's no date when dealing with software issues.

Also with academic papers!! I know that the reason they often have no date is because they're the free pre-publish draft and that the published version do have dates, but come on... So annoying not knowing whether what you're looking at is the state of the art or straight out of 1980

@12bitfloat: At least for IT papers and papers of your own field this luckily isn't an issue. But yes, everything should at least have a year of publication attached to it.

@Oktokolo Pretty much every IT paper draft I came across didn't have a date

@12bitfloat: I don't read papers often, but when i do, the abstract normally sorta tells whether it is about stuff i already know about or not. So you normally at least get an estimate of currentness relative to your knowledge - which most often is what you actually need to prefilter by knowledge gain potential.

When looking for articles about webdev, especially tutorials, not finding the date in the initial viewport or seeing a grammatical error are the two primary reasons I go back to my search results.

But it's not good for seo

@demortes If you annotate it correctly it's great for SEO while the article is fresh. Once the article is outdated it will be bad for SEO as it should be. The solution would be a flag to hide all results without dates but that's not gonna happen because the fewer results people visit before they find what they need the less ad revenue Google can collect.

Sadly, SEO isn't always picking up the right stuff. If it was, it was going to punish sites copy-pasting StackOverflow, but sadly, I've seen plenty of those even on the first page (I'm primarily using DDG, but the mechanisms should be the same as with Google).

@kamen I switched because Google is much worse.