With Google search, which page come at the top depends on several factors. The main ones are the age of the web page, number and quality of back-links to that page, the page rank etc.

That means the top search results you see in Google  are mostly a bit old!! And this is the same reason why you see Wikipedia posts at the top of Google search results most of the time.

But older pages at the top means you need to check out more than one search results to get the latest information. This situation usually comes if you are searching for stuff related to a very new technology or some recent developments to a breaking news.

In such cases, you can make use of Google's additional filters. E.g. If you search for James Murdoch's phone scandal, the following comes up-

The first result is a news from Huffington post which is only a report of the scandal. Now if you narrow the search for results within the past one hour, you get a surprise.

With the filter, you get the "Murdoch to face BSkyB board" news which actually is a recent development from half an hour ago.

In addition to the results from the past hour, Google also gives options like past 24 hours, past week, past month and past year. You also have filters like visited pages, not yet visited, pages from locations near you etc.

This is not a new feature and it has been around from 2009 when Google introduced it to compete with real time search engines like Twitter. But many a time, Google simply hides these useful filters under a link "More search Tools". The extra filters become available only on clicking on this link.

So next time you search for some hot news, don't forget the time line filters to see the most latest information.