The web shouldn’t all be about recency - we stand to lose too much valuable information if we think that way.
@adders True. In addition, I do think it would be nice if the search engines did give a bit more weight to recency, especially when it comes to tech questions. The number of times I've searched for some WP problem, and the whole front page of results is 7 or 8 years old.
@jeremycherfas Google certainly uses recency (“freshness”) as a weighting factor - but it's not as useful in that context as it should be.
@jeremycherfas Yup - it's quite a significant factor. If older content isn't updated, it tends to fade from the index after a while.