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by usr1106 525 days ago
What algorithm would you suggest to find the year in an arbitrary submission? Of course AI is not a very clearly defined term, more difficult problems certainly exist. I was just thinking of the case the submission contains several dates or none at all and still several hints a human would take into consideration get checked.

Of course some minimal implementation without AI techniques could already handle many cases. My AI suggestion was not death-serious ;)
3 comments
coder543 525 days ago
Google's research blog does not seem to provide this, but many blogs include the Open Graph metadata[0] around when the article was published or modified:

    article:published_time - datetime - When the article was first published.
    article:modified_time - datetime - When the article was last changed.
For example, I pulled up a random article on another website, and found these <meta> tags in the <head>:

    <meta property="article:published_time" content="2025-01-11T13:00:00.000Z">
    <meta property="article:modified_time" content="2025-01-11T13:00:00.000Z">
For pages that contain this metadata, it would be a cheaper/faster implementation than using an LLM, but using an LLM as a fallback could easily provide you with the publication date of this Google article.

[0]: https://ogp.me/

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coldtea 525 days ago
>What algorithm would you suggest to find the year in an arbitrary submission?

In the submission title, a simple regex for the presence of a date with a standard format (e.g. %Y) would suffice.

Matching it to the article might or might not be possible, but that would already be enough (assuming having the date is a good thing, which I'm not certain at all)

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pdimitar 525 days ago
As another comment suggested, you can scan for previous submissions by URL -- Algolia is very helpful with that.

Outside that, no clue, been a long time since I last wrote crawlers, admittedly. Though it can't be too difficult to crowd-source origin date parsers per domain?

But hey, if any LLM's free tier can achieve it, then why not. My point was that many people worked on that particular problem historically. It would be a shame if we can't use any of their hard work.

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