The freshness of Persian Information: the case of Persian Newspapers indexed in Google, Yahoo and Bing

Aiming to study the freshness of Persian information، the study attempted to explore the indexing speed of Persian newspapers in Google، Yahoo and Bing. The present study was conducted using a webometric method. The population study comprised all the online newspapers published in Persian. The study sample was identified using a targeted method. It included those Persian newspapers listed on the Magiran database with their electronic versions regularly published on their respective websites. The results revealed that Google outperforms the two other search engines in terms of timely indexing the Persian newspapers. Furthermore، it generally enjoys a more consistent and stable indexing model. Yahoo and Bing are not only slower in indexing the newspapers، but also experience a comparably lower consistency level in their indexing models. Yahoo and Bing show to be comparable in their indexing speeds. In this study، the indexing status of Persian newspapers on different internet search engines was investigated for the first time. Results showed that those accessing these newspapers using internet search engines will have a higher chance of accessing their most updated versions using Google.