As some of you may know you can search "time UK" for current local time on Google or Yahoo. I use this feature quite often, but one thing I never couldn't understand is why I can't query by the timezone.

It makes no sense to me. Since it's about time, using timezone as key is so natural to me. When you are participating international events remotely, it is not always have geographical location listed in the time table, timezone abbreviation is most likely to see. Practically, an event often is listed with two or three different local times with respective timezones.

I just don't understand why Google engineers don't get it or, the worst,not even think about it.

Okay, no timezones, fine. Then how about ISO-3166-1 alpha-2/3?
  • "time DE" gets you time in Delaware. I can't really argue about this one, because it's US-regional Google Search.
  • "time DEU" gets nothing.
  • "time GER" gets nothing.
  • "time germ" still nothing.
  • "time germa" still nothing.
  • "time german" frak still nothing.
  • "time germany" yea, finally.
Although "time CET" gets nothing on Yahoo, too, but "time DE" will get you time in Delaware and time in Germany in second line. You can also try "time NL"

Yahoo is smarter when you ask about time. Note that it's not like Google can't give you a list of times regarding the key you use, see "time US".

Maybe time is not so important in Google?

I had thought about writing a web page which can support querying by timezone, but DST is really the pain in the ass and I don't really know how to get accurate DST starting and end information.