I don't fully disagree with you, but I think it depends on the domain.

You're right that it's annoying the way Google will show me results of a blog post recently published by someone who just "discovered" something that's been known for decades, and what Google shows me is a poor summary of more in-depth original work done elsewhere.

But at the same time, I hate the way when I search for solutions to an issue involving computers, I'll Google shows me nothing but results that are 10 years old, and no longer work because the operating system has changed.

I wish I could put a limit on how old something could be before it's no longer allowed to show up in my Google Now cards in android.

Respect for high quality old content, mixed with a more prominent UI for the time filter (it used to be soon Google, but less so now) is the right trade-off imho.

I've noticed there are blogs that will do fake updates so the date in the Google search results will be from last week or something recent, even though the content itself is the same it has been for a couple years.

This is definitely a problem for people who write true evergreen content, or do frequent updates without updating the pubdate, but across the internet I would imagine there is much more old content that is out of date than old content that is still just as relevant, so it seems like a smart strategy.

I was thinking about this too. Search engines should regularly crawl a page and notice that the content has been updated right? So it seems like they should ignore pubdate as it could be gamed, and just measure the real "last updated" date based on content changes.

> So it seems like they should ignore pubdate as it could be gamed, and just measure the real "last updated" date based on content changes.

It's hard to imagine a mechanistic measure of the 'real' last-updated date that couldn't also be gamed. (If I'm being really cynical, it's hard to imagine anything that couldn't be gamed; so I guess I mean 'easily gamed', for some value of 'easily'.)

I’ve got my update cron job waiting in the wings.

It's not only a problem with the search engines' own rankings, it's also that people are less likely to click an older article on the SERP.

That’s definitely true. I often find myself clicking first on a more recent search result and then backing out and clicking on older content if the initial choice didn’t live up to expectations. Since I probably still had decent time on page, etc for the first link, I’m guessing I’m making Google think that content is more relevant than it is.