Date Search, How does YaCy recognize start/end dates?

I’m thinking of turning this feature on, whatever it is or however it works, but, out of curiosity:

I would often like to search for events. What is happening in the community, around town, within local driving distance.

In general, in the past, searching for any kind of event with any available search engine would often result in finding a web page about something that happened already, like last month or last year. Often quite useless.

Also, some numbers on some web page could be almost anything. How in the world could YaCy possibly distinguish a “Start date” from an “End date”, or recognize any kind of date from other numerical data on a website?

My assumption is that this could only work if the dates on the page are marked up with XML or JSON or some such thing. There are also, perhaps a dozen different possible date formats that could exist in almost any context.

If I wanted to create a web page about an event, how would I best mark up the web page or designate the start date of an event so that YaCy could recognize it?

This seems like a very interesting and useful feature, but I would like to know how it works. What are the limitations? What is possible?

dates_2

What the heck is itemprop?

A form of “microdata”, apparently? How many web-page creators actually use this kind of markup?

Does the date have to be in ISO 8601 format for YaCy to recognize it or will it store anything appearing within a date meta field as shown above?

Oh, one other thing, does this have to be turned on, the check boxes ticked for start dates etc. before a crawl is executed, or is all this metadata automatically stored regardless?

That is, If I’ve already crawled an event page with this startDate metadata but with this feature turned off, would it be necessary to crawl the page again to have this kind of metadata indexed?

I have attempted to search for anything dated in the future, Anything happening after today’s date of July 26th 2019.

This appears to be trying to work in that dates are found and displayed, however there is just one page of results and all the dates are past rather than future.

I did just turn on the dates features, but without re-starting anything.

I’m wondering about the reason for the lack of significant results. Is it because, I have not re-started YaCy? I’m using the wrong search parameters? Few, if any peers on the network have ever had the feature turned on so few dates have been indexed? Hardly anyone on the internet has bothered marking up their events with the proper startDate metadata?

There are many event calendars on the internet for posting or listing events, unfortunately they mostly all use some inaccessible (to search engines) database or proprietary format rather than any open standard.

My suspicion is that such “Schema.org” metadata structuring is just too mind numbingly complicated and incomprehensible for the average person putting up a web page about their upcoming Yoga class or whatever.

In other words YaCy is incredibly sophisticated and way ahead of its time I think.

I’m guessing that the “findsomething from: [date]” syntax was for an old version of YaCy and has been deprecated?

Is it now simply from: [date] to: [date] ?

as appears under “more options”: