In addition to the date, the time of publishing is often showing up in the result, or at least a notification of how long previously, like in the Google News index.

Matt Cutts confirms that Google’s "minty fresh indexing" is a reality, chronicling that his own blog posts were indexed in 30 minutes or less.

Cutts lauds his company’s indexing team for their success in creating crawlers that scour web in near real-time. As search becomes more common place and people turn to Google to find the latest information, fresh indexing will not only become important, but also essential.

"I can’t imagine waiting over a month for search engines to update their index with news events any more," he writes, "but just a few years ago that’s how things worked. And it only takes a few encounters with a fresh index until you ratchet up your expectations."

But one has to wonder also, as other reports show that as many as 40 percent of searches are repeat queries from people looking for information they have found in the past, how "minty fresh" the index needs to be. That same study showed that searchers had trouble finding prior sources if the rankings changed.