I’ve written extensively over the years about Google’s long-standing issue with displaying incorrect dates in their search engine results. Despite multiple complaints from SEOs, journalists, and even conspiracy theorists, Google has continued to show wrong publication dates on content—dates that don’t reflect when the article was actually posted. In fact, Google reps told me directly on more than one occasion that the issue had been addressed. But sure enough, it kept popping up again.
Today, though, it’s not Google I’m calling out.
It’s Microsoft Bing.
Just a few minutes ago, I published a new blog post. We’re talking less than 30 minutes ago—yet Bing is already showing the post as being “21 hours old” in its search results. This isn’t just a slight miscalculation. It’s a major discrepancy that misleads readers and undermines the freshness of content I worked hard to publish.
Bing has usually done better than Google when it comes to date accuracy in the past. But now, it looks like they’re struggling with the same issue. I’m not the only one seeing it either—others have reported seeing Bing show incorrect or outdated timestamps on freshly posted content. Fabrice Canel from Bing has acknowledged the issue publicly, so at least it’s on their radar.
This reminds me of how conspiracy theorists have weaponized date inaccuracies. Earlier this year, some pointed to Google’s misdated search results as supposed “evidence” that certain news articles were published before an actual event happened—like the Washington D.C. plane and helicopter crash. Of course, the event wasn’t predicted—it was just Google’s faulty timestamping.
These kinds of search engine bugs matter. Accurate publication dates help build trust with readers and are critical for time-sensitive content. When search engines get it wrong, it confuses users and damages the credibility of the content itself.
I sincerely hope Bing moves quickly to fix this. I’ve seen what happens when search engines ignore this kind of problem—and it’s not pretty.
Date Problems since 2016
Here’s my previous posts about Google’s date problem, which go back as far as 2016:
Google Bug Causes False Date To Show in Search Results
https://www.billhartzer.com/search-engines/google-bug-causes-false-date-showing-in-serps-rankings-drops/
Does Google Have a Date Problem?
https://www.billhartzer.com/google/google-date-problem/
Google Must Fix their Timestamp Issue
https://www.billhartzer.com/google/google-must-fix-timestamp-issue/
One of the questions that has never really been addressed is exactly where the search engines, Microsoft Bing and Google, get their dates and times (the timestamp) on posts. Some have said that it’s from the post itself, but that could be manipulated by a website owner, so I don’t think that’s the source. What I suspect is that it’s the crawl date and time, when the search engine last crawled that particular post (or when they first discovered it). If that was the case, then fine–but maybe it has something to do with the time zone? I don’t think this is the case now that I think about it as I write this–21 hours ago, it would have to be crawled from a time zone that’s 21 hours different?
And, just to confirm Microsoft Bing’s date problem, THIS post was posted a few minutes ago, and apparently ALL my posts today were posted “21 hours ago”:
