I don't think its that complicated. Whenever you search for news on Google, it shows you X minutes ago, or N hours ago, or M days ago, etc. They simply stamp the INITIAL, FIRST time they crawled the article, and when they provide results, the take the diff between the current time, and their initial time stamp. Because its news, they DONT update the time stamp everytime the article changes, so it resets the counter. Otherwise, that would screw everything up. The fact that this article says it was posted 3 hours before the gunmen went there is an oversight that has blown their cover.
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drodesta18 ago
I do see that, but I'm not sure how accurate the time stamp is. We definitely need someone with knowledge of Google's algorithm to look into this
bigDanold ago
I don't think its that complicated. Whenever you search for news on Google, it shows you X minutes ago, or N hours ago, or M days ago, etc. They simply stamp the INITIAL, FIRST time they crawled the article, and when they provide results, the take the diff between the current time, and their initial time stamp. Because its news, they DONT update the time stamp everytime the article changes, so it resets the counter. Otherwise, that would screw everything up. The fact that this article says it was posted 3 hours before the gunmen went there is an oversight that has blown their cover.