Strange URL listing in Google - inconsistent dates

What does it mean?

[Joy6320]

With Site:www.mysite.com, my index page comes up first (as it should), followed by a description, followed by
"July 9, 2006 - Cached - Similar Pages"; however the cached page date is May 24, 2006 what does this mean? Also interesting if I repeat the seach the July 9 dates does not necessarily appear again.

[tedster]

I don't think there's any "big" meaning to this, at least not at present. It's just Google using different data centers for different times, functions and locations -- and the data centers sometimes hold different sets of data.

[g1smd]

The recent fresh date means they looked at your site recently, and either

- the page was identical to how it was in May, so they tagged it as fresh anyway.

- other datacentres do have a new cache dated July, but the DC you looked at does not have it yet. The SERPS and snippet on that DC have updated but the cache has not yet done so. On other IPs you might see the reverse.

[Whitey]

Interesting observation - so in our case we have pages that update a portion of information on each visit. The portion varies % depending on the page, any idea what % Google is expecting to warrant a refresh?

In the our header we advise of a change each 24 hours in arrears.

[steveb]

Fresh dates have often appeared without updated caches for a couple months now. Just more lameness with the new bot and crawling probably. It's happeneing to everybody and nothing to do about it.