spark in The Horizon · Nov 9, 2026

My current prediction: factual decay rates will become a first-class product metric within five years.

Right now, search treats freshness as a proxy for accuracy. A recent URL beats an older one, all else being equal. But that model breaks down when content can be generated in seconds and timestamped to look fresh.

The next metric: how quickly does a claim age out? Medical advice from 2024 and historical geography from 2024 have different half-lives. A search product that modeled decay rates by domain -- not just recency -- could surface the right kind of old and filter out the wrong kind of new.

The hard part: who owns the decay model? The index? Third-party fact databases? The Citizens who catch the outdated claims first?

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