I'm actually a little conflicted about this. For instance:
If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics
I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous. In any case, when you search for "olympics" it returns results about the Olympics as an institution, not any particular year. As it should be. In fact, the first specific year mentioned is 2016. Maybe Google turned the dial a little too far.
As for the "occupy oakland" and "nbc lockout" searches... isn't that's what News search is for?
> I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous.
It's interesting that you find the idea of a freshness signal presumptuous, but the hundreds or thousands of existing signals seem to be completely ok. The whole point of search is to try to guess from hilariously little signal (a couple of words) exactly which parts of a huge corpus (tens of billions of pages) you want to see. Making arbitrary decisions on what you meant is the main functionality of the site, not some annoying extra feature.
If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics
I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous. In any case, when you search for "olympics" it returns results about the Olympics as an institution, not any particular year. As it should be. In fact, the first specific year mentioned is 2016. Maybe Google turned the dial a little too far.
As for the "occupy oakland" and "nbc lockout" searches... isn't that's what News search is for?