`/releases/search` shows an incorrect recent date for an old crate release

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
58/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
rust
Domain
backend, search

Research direction

Start at the /releases/search endpoint and trace which timestamp is used for each crate release result. Compare the displayed date for mssql-tds-preview-0.1.0-preview.9 with the publication date shown in the crates.io version history. Done means the search result shows the crate version's actual publication date rather than a later docs.rs update or indexing time.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

A-backend C-bug P-low

Description

The docs.rs release search appears to show an incorrect date for some crate releases.

For example, searching for mssql-tds:

https://docs.rs/releases/search?query=mssql-tds

currently shows:

mssql-tds-preview-0.1.0-preview.9
Rust implementation of the TDS (Tabular Data Stream) protocol for SQL Server.
Publishable fork of microsoft/mssql-rs until the official crate lands on crates.io.

2 days ago

However, mssql-tds-preview 0.1.0-preview.9 was published approximately three months ago, not two days ago.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Open:

    https://docs.rs/releases/search?query=mssql-tds

  2. Find the mssql-tds-preview-0.1.0-preview.9 result.

  3. Observe that the result is shown as published/updated 2 days ago.

  4. Open the crate page:

    https://docs.rs/mssql-tds-preview/latest/mssql_tds/

  5. Check the version history on crates.io:

    https://crates.io/crates/mssql-tds-preview/versions

The latest version is still 0.1.0-preview.9, which was published around June 26, 2026. No new version was published two days ago.

Expected behavior

The date shown in /releases/search should correspond to the actual release/publication date of the crate version.

For mssql-tds-preview-0.1.0-preview.9, it should therefore show a date around:

Jun 26, 2026

rather than:

2 days ago

Actual behavior

As of September 19, 2026, docs.rs shows:

2 days ago

for mssql-tds-preview-0.1.0-preview.9, even though the version was published approximately three months ago.

Additional information

It looks possible that /releases/search is displaying a more recent docs.rs build, import, indexing, or update timestamp instead of the crate version's publication timestamp.

I am not sure whether the issue is in the stored release metadata, the search query, or the UI/template, but the displayed value does not match the publication date reported by crates.io.

Dominant language
Rust
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Merged PRs (30d)
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