I’ve been thinking lately about the growing problem around time-sensitive content on the Web. The Web has been in mass use for about 10 years now, and I constantly end up finding content that is completely out of date. Two recent examples:

- I was searching for a good restaurant in Westchester, and I found a review of a restaurant that sounded perfect - the food was well-reviewed and the prices were excellent. But when I went to find the restaurant’s phone number, I discovered that the place had been closed for 5 years, and the review itself was from 1987! No wonder the prices were so good…

- I had some trouble the other day getting a font to show up in my font list in Photoshop, so I did a Google search for something like “font installation photoshop mac”. Several of the first 10-20 results I got were talking about outdated software and systems, like how to install fonts for Photoshop 7 on OS 9. Gee, thanks Google.

Actually, Google clearly IS working on some of these problems as you can see from the “timeline” view in their Google News search (above). However, this feature is pretty buried and restricted to only news searches. And it’s also not perfect. It can’t always tell the difference between when something was published an when a date is mentioned as part of the content of a page. And indeed, figuring out the age of content is tricky, especially since a large percentage of web pages are generated dynamically, so using the server’s date-stamp (or something equally basic) is not usually a reliable measure.

Clearly this problem is only going to get worse as there is a larger and larger archive of old content online. What solutions do you think will or should be developed to address it? Do you know of other apps/interfaces/companies out there who are working on the problem and have interesting solutions? Post your responses in the comments.