last-modified date is backwards

[grantcv1]

Hi,

I have set the last-modified date in my documents strictly in accordance with the Zoom documentation. But when I finally got things indexing, the results I am getting aren't correct.

First I specified the time as Pacific Daylight Time (the time here in San Diego). What I got back was a GMT time that was way off. For instance, in the meta tag I specified:

<meta http-equiv="Last-Modified" content="Tue, 01 May 2007 01:00:00 PDT"/>

What I got back from the search result was:

<pubDate>Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:59:59 GMT</pubDate>

That would only make sense San Diego was somewhere in the Middle East - near Pakistan. While we aren't too good at geography in the US, I am pretty sure that San Diego is not in the Middle East. My understanding is that PDT is GMT-8. Instead it seems to be equating PDT to GMT+5 (minus one second).

To work around this, I tried:

<meta http-equiv="Last-Modified" content="Tue, 01 May 2007 01:00:00 GMT-8"/>

What I now got back was:

<pubDate>Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:59:59 GMT</pubDate>

Same thing, GMT+5

My next attempt was simply to normalize to GMT for the sake of getting the correct day:

<meta http-equiv="Last-Modified" content="Tue, 08 May 2007 12:00:00 GMT"/>

Comes back as:

<pubDate>Tue, 08 May 2007 04:59:59 GMT</pubDate>

Shifted back 7 hours!!!!! Unfortunately, when my system converts that result to a "date" it comes back as May 7 (PDT) - a day earlier again

It is super important that these dates be correct - they are reflecting when legislation became law and being off by a day is not acceptable.

[Ray]

Zoom does not currently recognize timezones specified in the Last-Modified meta tag. This is documented in the Help file and Users Guide as follows:

[Timezone] is optional (eg. “GMT”, “GMT-5”). Note that Zoom will not perform any timezone conversions based on this.

So this is why specifying &quot;PDT&quot;, or &quot;GMT-8&quot; made no difference.

However, you did bring to light a bug in the CGI version. It is currently converting the datetime retrieved from the meta tag (which is assumed to be in GMT/UTC) to the local timezone of your web server. This is incorrect in that our intention was to to perform no conversions and return the date/time in the same timezone as they were specified (ie: GMT). We will fix this in the next public release.

It is also quite clear here that it would be much more beneficial if Zoom would actually recognize the timezone specified in the meta tag, and convert this to a single timezone as selected by the user. This would be important for users who are indexing multiple websites, from different parts of the world with different timezones. This would allow you to select a single &quot;output timezone&quot; so that your search results can be returned in your preferred timezone - and allow you to index pages in various different timezones. We have added this to our todo list and we will try to get this included in the next (or later) build. [UPDATE] The meta tag is now being accepted in V6.