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I was recently inconvenienced by Titles or Question bodies that say "a couple of days ago", "Yesterday" or "Today" because I was forced to scroll down to see question asked date and do some mental math.

As such I changed the questions' titles to reflect the actual date in question:

My thinking is that people looking for other questions about a recent update would prefer solutions addressing similar situation rather than a question 2 years old that had different OS version.

Are there negative consequences of an explicit date in the title?

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    I don't think the date should really be in the title, would be better in the body if it is relevant. It could mess with Google results by omitting the questions due to people not searching for the date part. Just a thought, not to sure if that would actually be an issue
    – Mark Kirby
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 19:04
  • Consider that some issues are still solved by 'older' solutions that worked with older OSes, so there are some cases where this is detrimental.
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 19:13
  • @ThomasWard I noticed that most users to post they tried older solutions too. My thinking is they would want to start with the newest solutions and work backwards from there. So I take it you are in the camp to leave the title at today or yesterday if they contained that? Another method users would take is selecting the most-upvoted Q&A first which may be the oldest ones.
    – WinEunuuchs2Unix
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 19:17
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    @MarkKirby people would omit the date from the search string. If your logic was applied though people who didn't say "yesterday's update" would have results omitted from Google search. Which of course it doesn't do. It simply matches the keywords provided, ie "Ubuntu compiz update". If the search result also contains "it rains on tuesdays" it doesn't detract from matching keywords.
    – WinEunuuchs2Unix
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 19:39
  • I was more advocating for removing any references to date or day or yesterday, from the title altogether. The Google issue would be that other questions may be pushed further up the results due to being better matches than questions with dates in the title but I could be wrong, I'm no Google master.
    – Mark Kirby
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 19:45
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    @MarkKirby yes removing yesterday / today / couple of days ago is another option to consider.
    – WinEunuuchs2Unix
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 19:48

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