Like most companies, we here at Red Clay have a fantasy football league.  And every Thursday, some of us will check out the practice reports to see who showed up for practice and who’s injured.   For me, that means searching Google for that player’s name, hitting the “Search Options”, and setting the scope to “past 24 hours” so that I’ve got the most recent practice reports.  Google went ahead and made that scope change permanent for me today, with one of their famous algorithm tweaks.

Quoting the official Google Blog, “If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics”.  That makes sense.  The article goes on to say this not only applies to dates, but other queries such as goods and products as well.  If you search for “digital slr”, Google will now serve up information about new models, not the older ones.  Overall, Google estimates that this will affect about 35% of their searches.

What does this mean?  Obviously, this means that Google is much more focused on giving you important, time-sensitive, and up-to-date information.  If you peel back that layer, you can also interpret that Google is going to want updated content, meaning a steady publishing plan via an easy to use content management system is very important (as if you didn’t hear that enough).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some fantasy players to research – darn BYE weeks.

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