Query deserves freshness (QDF)

Google’s then head of search, Amit Singhal, described QDF publicly in a 2007 New York Times interview. The model watches two signals: a surge in publishing from news sites and blogs, and a spike in Google’s own stream of queries. When both point at a topic being “hot,” Google reads that as a sign people want current information and leans toward recency for that query.

How Google decides a query deserves freshness

The idea became a named algorithm change in November 2011. Google said the update “impacts roughly 35 percent of searches” and named three query types that benefit: recent events or hot topics (a protest, an earthquake), regularly recurring events (an election, NFL scores), and topics with frequent updates (best SLR cameras, a car’s reviews). It built on the Caffeine indexing infrastructure, which let Google surface pages only minutes old.

QDF is selective, and the point is right in the name: not every query deserves fresh results. Google still lists “query deserves freshness” systems as active in its ranking systems guide. Its own example: a search for “earthquake” normally returns preparedness resources, and only after a recent quake do news articles take over. For a stable evergreen query, slapping a “2026” date on a rewrite wins nothing and can waste crawl and authority signals. The value comes from correctly sorting your target queries into the ones recency helps and the ones it does not.