Only the Freshest Pages Please!
This is a simple yet very important tip, but one that I know most Googlers never use. By using it your searches for timely information it will more likely present pages with more recently written or updated information. With a simple selection, you can include in your results only web pages that have been written or updated, and crawled and indexed by Google in the past three months, six months or year. Think about how critical this can be in the researching of important things like prescription drugs.
To access this feature, simply use Google’s Advanced Search page. On this page you’ll see the selection for “Date.” Use the drop-down selection box to select only pages that have been updated in either the past three months, the past six months, the past year, or anytime (regular search).
There is also a third-party API-based Search called GooFresh that will allow you to search for new/updated pages in Google with selections of today, yesterday, last seven days and last 30 days.
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Is there a way to set this as a relatively permanent preference?
I played around with the “Freshest Pages” tip, and I discovered that you can actually get to the three date-limited searches without going to the Advanced Search page. The URLs are as follows:
3 months:
http://www.google.com/search?as_qdr=m3&as_q=***
6 months:
http://www.google.com/search?as_qdr=m6&as_q=***
One year:
http://www.google.com/search?as_qdr=y&as_q=***
You have to enter in your search query in the place of “***”, of course. I tried modifying the “as_qdr” parameter for other lengths of time, but it appears that Google only supports these three specific date limitations. It won’t even accept “12m” or “1y” as a parameter; a one-year search limitation can only be specified, with no numeral, as “y”.
On OSX, these three searches can be directly used with Quicksilver. If the URLs are added to a browser’s bookmarks (and the plugin for that browser is loaded in Quicksilver), QS automatically senses that these bookmarks are searches and allows your search term to replace the “***” string in the URL. The trick is to name the bookmarks properly so that you can find them easily with Quicksilver.
Unfortunately, Quicksilver can’t use these URLs as searches if you put them in del.icio.us and access them with the del.icio.us plugin; the ampersand (“&”) character confuses the del.icio.us plugin and nothing happens when you select the bookmark.
Thanks for the great info Herr.
In Firefox, you can add this parameter to the Google search string by going to the about:config page (type “about:config” in the location field and hit enter) and changing the value of the property named “keyword.URL”.
In Firefox, you can add this parameter to the Google search string by going to the about:config page (type “about:config” in the location field and hit enter) and changing the value of the property named “keyword.URL”.