Nothing really new in this to be honest Chris - I've been saying exactly this for years now. In many respects, it stands to reason - if a search engine pays particular attention to back links (as most do), the older the piece, the more links it's going to have. Consequently the higher up the ranking it will go. You also find something similar with index/directory engines; if they base their decision in part on the criteria of 'does the newly submitted site have new information' it will always mean that older, more established sites will have an advantage. Moreover, it is much more difficult to get into a directory than to get out of it, exacerbating the situation.
It's one of the reasons that if I want current data, I'm not going to use Google. I'll re-rank with Exalead or use MSN search builder to get me the most recent information. The situation is slightly confused with Google, because they do give an artificial push up the rankings to begin with, but after a while this has less effect, and new sites/pages slide down again, unless they get lots of links.
I have found that Yahoo and MSN have more up to date indexes than Google's. Do a search on "Chris Rhodes" (my husband) in Google. Top of the results should be a link to 'Prof Chris Rhodes - Liverpool JM University', his home page. Compare Google's cached copy with the live version. The layout of the current version was changed about a year ago.
OK, so we know that Google is searching out of date information. But, in this case, it is also lying about when the cached copy was retrieved from the web site. It claims to have retrieved it on 7 February 2006, but an updated version of the new layout was up-loaded on 27 January, 2006 at 07:54:59. I would dearly love to know where Google got its current cached copy from.
Yahoo and MSN have the most up to date version in their caches: Yahoo does not give a date but MSN says 30/04/2006. Ask has the old layout, and Exalead doesn't have it all :-(
As an aside, I realised when doing this exercise that Chris's home page doesn't have a 'Last updated..' on it. I'm off to rectify that now.
Commenting by HaloScan
