Why is the article date on the discovery page wrong?

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Sometimes the date we show for a specific article does't match the date of the article itself. 

Unfortunately, dates are quire error prone. Because how do we even define an article date? when it was first published? when it was published on this particular website? when it was last updated? 

On top of that, we have another key issue with dates: there is no standard how to show a date so that search crawlers and robots can understand it. That's why search engines often try to interpret the date themselves, and depending on the engine's intelligence and local knowledge this is more or less reliable. If an engine can not read any date, it just delivers the crawl date, i.e. the date it first discovered the page or when it last saw it. 

That's what happens to us when our search engine (webhose) can't find or understand the article date. Which – of course – is very unfortunate for those of you who curate based on current events and heavily rely on the dates. We can't influence webhose much on this front, but we're keeping an eye on it to see if we can find patterns e.g. from certain publishers.