Google should be massively down ranking sites that do this. Also if a site has a huge historical archive, that should be a positive indicator of site quality, not a negative one.

Reddit does this and it's very frustrating

Wow, I thought that was just me. The elation of googling for a niche Reddit topic and finding one very recent only to reach that sad realization that the content is 11y old and likely not relevant anymore.

Even worse when this happens, and you find that it's an old post you made. Happened to me more than once. I never realized this was intentional on reddit's part; I just assumed Google was broken.

I've been unable to find a reddit post in google I read yesterday and remembered all of the words in the title. No idea what is going on there.

Yup, "Last Updated on xxx" but no obvious updates called out in the article

And definitely no "diff" to previous versions.

Even if updates are mostly minor corrections or batch updates of boilerplate, the capability exists to rewrite any part or all of a story if there's no way to see past versions from third-parties from a single cache from archive.is or possibly archive.org.

Archival navigation and visualization should be deeply integrated into a user-centric, privacy browser.

Yea I’ve noticed that as well. It’s really annoying when you search for something new but it links to an article that says a few months but it’s in fact years old.

I'm not certain they are altering publish dates, it is probably an error of Google. I've my own sites in the search results with wrong publishing dates, that don't make any sense.