Dr Who is alive and well and living not in the Tardis but at the Googleplex.

So says Chris Anderson (he of the long tail):

“We’re used to the newspaper model of content: new is what matters and yesterday’s news is fish-wrap. But Google and the other search engines are time-agnostic. And the result of that is a dramatic shift in demand towards older material. What matters to modern search engines is relevance, measured mostly by the number of other sites that link to a page. A little-noticed implication of this is that older content tends to score higher because it’s had longer to accumulate incoming links. In other words, search inverts the usual priority of content: older is often better.”

This, he says, “frees us from the tyranny of the new … Archives rule!”

I would say the phenemenon is less like newspaper content than a book publisher’s backlist. It’s well-known that many long-established publishers make around 50 percent of their income from the backlist: books that are no longer on the shelves but which sell steadily by other means, often single orders direct to the publisher’s fulfilment operation.

Blogs are particularly relevant because they automatically file older posts by date and provide internal search facilities. The whole process is almost invisible to the average blogger, but it’s there for the spider when it comes acrawling. So the most transient of content — the blog post — gains importance with time in ways that other more weighty material doesn’t.

Chris makes an interesting point here, although he’s qualified it later with an update suggesting that Google’s algorithm reduces the relevance of older content gradually over time, but not by enough to counteract the effect. In other words, Google makes the old the new new.

Dr Who, the last Time Lord, will be pleased.