This should be good. Many queries get clogged up with the long tail of pages from 2003 that are often useless to answer the question at hand.
I hope Google will let us turn it off easily ("-fresh" keyword? advanced search?) if we truly want older pages.
I also hope this won't lead to content farms auto-republishing their pages every six hours with the latest timestamp included to look "fresh". Or rather, I know it will lead to that, and I hope Google is prepared for it.
I also hope that the effect that "freshness" has on the total ranking of a result is not high. There are huge swaths of the internet and subjects in which "freshness" would not improve quality.
Changes of this blanket nature are a result of some form of the "Valley Effect" or new is always better. IMO.
The example used, the Olympics, is an outlyer comparison in which this specific change is overly relevant.
I hope Google will let us turn it off easily ("-fresh" keyword? advanced search?) if we truly want older pages.
I also hope this won't lead to content farms auto-republishing their pages every six hours with the latest timestamp included to look "fresh". Or rather, I know it will lead to that, and I hope Google is prepared for it.