Migrating American Medical Association’s search to Solr by Doug Turnbull.
Read the entire post but one particular point is important to me:
Research journal users value recent publications very highly. Users want to see recent research, not just documents that score well due to how frequently search terms occur in a document. If you were a doctor, would you rather see brain cancer research that occurred this decade or in the early 20th century?
I call this out because it is one of my favorite peeves about Google search results.
Even if generalized date parsing is too hard, Google should know when it first encountered a particular resource.
At the very least a listing by “age” of a link should be trivially possible.
How important is recent information to your users?