I have read lots of articles about how to constrain search results on Google by domain, by site, and even how to group words and include “negative” keywords to ensure that I don’t get spurious matches. What I haven’t figured out is whether there’s any way to constrain my searches by date. For example, to just find material that’s been updated or indexed in the last week. Doable?
You can definitely constrain your Google search results by time, but it’s one of the many types of searches that are best started by going to the Advanced Search Page rather than just searching from the home page or within your Browser navbar. On that page you’ll see:
Lots of options, as you can see, but notice in particular “Return web pages first seen in the” and a pop-up menu of options. I’ve selected “last week” and that will constrain our search results to being just those pages that have been added to the index in the last 7 days.
Execute a search like this, though, and notice the additional parameter on the search URL. For example: “stompernet” appears in the text of the page and it’s been added to Google in the last week. Click on that and notice that the search results includes the nice little box:
Once you’ve done one date constraint, you can clearly chose other settings easily enough!
The URL’s scary-long, but there’s one parameter we want to see since it’s fun and easy to play with this date constraint parameter:
Confusing, but other folk have done the decoding here (notably here and here) so we can learn that in this instance w stands for “week”, and that “d” is day and “y” is years. As explained:
d[number] | past number of days (e.g.: d10) |
w[number] | past number of weeks |
y[number] | past number of years |
Armed with this knowledge, here’s a really simple search for pages that have referenced “atlanta” in the last day:
Got it? Now, go wild hacking those Google URLs! 🙂
Ok I did use the google advanced search and searched a certain site (news) and “within the last year” now I’m confused… one article according to google has the date of “May 02, 2008” but when I clicked on it the actual article says it was published “Feb. 27, 2008” (and didn’t show any updates). then another article google dated “May 02, 2008” but the article itself says it was published “May 04, 2008”.
Where exactly does the date that google lists come from?
After you use Googles search by date you’ll soon start to notice it does not work. It may do a little for you but still the results that come back need to be searched through. I typically put the year into the search results to help it along too. Still the results it returns are no where near accurate.