At the beginning of this month Google announced a new ‘freshness’ update to their algorithm. On their official blog, they described these changes like this:
If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics (the only time my favorite sport, cricket, was played). Google Search uses a freshness algorithm, designed to give you the most up-to-date results, so even when I just type [olympics] without specifying 2012, I still find what I’m looking for.
This new algorithm is affecting 35% of searches.
I tested this out this morning by searching for ‘egypt tahrir square’ knowing that further clashes have occurred this weekend in Egypt. You can see from this screenshot that the top result after the news was updated 25 minutes ago. I expected the first few results to be about the protests in Tahrir square much earlier this year:

So you can see immediately how much ‘fresher’ Google results are now with this new update.