Google About to Add Relevance and Dating to SERPS?

By Herb Firestone
Marketing Coordinator

And just exactly how do I happen to know this?

Well the last two Thursdays I happened to publish YouTube videos in my blog posts: First Defining Social Media on the 14th and then 9 Viral Video Strategies on the 21st.

I found it interesting that when I searched “How to upload a YouTube video to WordPress,” eight out of the first ten Google search results were old, obsolete, or at the very least, much harder than the process had to be. Most of the SERPs seemed to advise unchecking the visual editor at the bottom of your WordPress User page and pasting the embed code that’s readily available on the video’s YouTube page into your post.

Well folks, not exactly rocket science, but I’m here to tell you that there’s an even easier, more up to date way to upload YouTube video to WordPress, which I’ll explain in my next post. The point of all this, however, is merely to point out that for such a popular task, the Google search results were neither timely or relevant.

Taking into consideration the fact that Google values the age of domains, I was planning to suggest that they consider balancing domain age with relevance and timeliness. In any event I was beaten to the punch because apparently that’s exactly what they’ve done in England. Tom Critchow outscooped me, so to speak, in his Google Tests Sort By Date/Sort By Relevance Feature In SERPs on August 19th. He goes on to explain that upon searching his name in Google, lo and behold, the choice of whether to sort by relevance or date appeared at the top right. After I searched his name in Google, and the sort by relevance or date choice didn’t come up, I came to the conclusion that with many different data centers around the world, Google was probably testing the feature in England.

To make it more confusing, I tried it again today and the relevance or date feature still doesn’t come up in the “regular” or “main” Google.com. It does however, appear when I search his name, or for that matter, anything else in Google Blogsearch. In any event although we have no idea whether or not sort by relevance and date is coming to google.com in the states, at this point, we do know it’s already here on Google Blogsearch.