OK, so this dates back to January 11, more than two months ago, but once I ran into it I couldn't let it go.

The conspiracy

Here's a few quotes:

(NaturalNews) As of the time of this writing, if you search on Google for the URL of the United Way Sandy Hook fundraising page (see instructions, below), you will get a Google search result saying the page was created on December 11, 2012. What's so odd about that? The Sandy Hook shooting took place three days later, on December 14, 2012. If your head is suddenly ringing with shouts of "conspiracy theory!" you're not alone. This kind of news immediately sets off red flags with most people, including myself. "Is this for REAL?" I found myself asking when I first saw this. So I grabbed a screen shot from Google search results, and you can see that below. Yep, it shows December 11, 2012, clear as day. In fact, it has consistently shown this for the past four days.

Surely Mike checked into this, and yep, here it is:

I did some checking around and found that one Google engineer says the date is a "glitch." That seems odd, since Google's date property seems to be accurate for everything else I can find. For example, I wrote a story about the mysterious death of John Noveske yesterday. If you run a Google search for it, using the date parameter, it correctly lists the exact HOUR of my publication of that page.

The simple debunking

Super simple to debunk, Mr. Adams. Here, I'm going to do a Google search for one of my own blog entries:

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+a+perl+script+helped+me+learn+ruby

Check the timestamp on Google. Yes, I did indeed write that on December 6, 2011, but here's the thing: that content has been deleted, and re-uploaded to S3, since then. A completely new page, created within the past 5 days, is there. How's that work, then? Google relies on the timestamp on the remote end. On my blog, I have an offline blog engine that builds the pages from text files that are written in Markdown format but have a YAML header:

--- categories: [converted] comments: true date: 2011/12/06 00:00:00 layout: post title: How a Perl script helped me learn Ruby ---

Check the page. Yes, the engine pulls the date straight from the "date:" entry. The engine is totally trusting of that, and Google is trusting of the date on that page. If I wished to put 2063/04/04 21:30:00, it would show up as April 4, 2063.

Picard had a clever comment about April 4, 2063 and first contact, but he's too busy stewing over Temple Run 2.

Conclusion

Stick to health news, Mike.

I know I won't change anyone's minds, because despite apparently distrusting everything they hear from mainstream media, conspiracy-minded folk tend to be mighty credulous when it comes to this kind of stuff. Nevertheless, even though I'm late to the game and am probably going to be ignored as an Obama-butt-kissing tool, I can't let a major boner like that lie. There's plenty of reasons to mistrust the government; this is not proof supporting that premise.

Oh, and one more thing:

Yes, there are comments with a timestamp from a day before the story date.

Keep plucking that chicken.

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