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Telling time using search engines isn’t always the right time

I enjoy Angus Logan’s blog, in particular, a recent post on what to do when you’re drowning in email.  But his new post calls out a great function on how to use Live Search to tell the time in <random city you have no idea where>

“I always find myself trying to figure out what time zone a city is in;

“And [Live Search is] smart too – it can tell the difference between Brisbane & Sydney in Australia (both GMT+1000) but one has DST and the other doesn’t.”

That’s a cool feature. 

Unfortunately, Live Search isn’t up to date on their time zones. Neither is Google.  (Reminds me of an old song by Morris Day and The Time… I’m showing my age.)

For example, I ran a search on “time Argentina” on both Live.com and Google.com: both displayed the incorrect time:

image 

When I ran the search (at 11:31 PM Pacific) it was actually 5:31 AM in Argentina (not that I actually called anyone there to verify), not 4:31 AM as shown: the searched returned the incorrect results for countries that have had recent DST and TZ changes.  Argentina just made the change on December 30 (as I noted here), when the country adopted a new DST offset of -0200 UTC.

I also tried the search out with one of the latest changes (this one from a favourite, memorable series on one particular South American country that had some difficulty deciding on when to make the change):

image

Unfortunately the time quoted is incorrect, off by 30 minutes.  There is a new cumulative Windows OS update which includes the correct time for Venezuela.  In this case, Venezuela is -0430 UTC as of mid December (they have a new DST in effect, as noted noted in this post).

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, DST. 4,020,000; 10,600,000; 649,000+

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