> 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.
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.