Google Introduces Search By Time

One of Google’s new developments is the adding of another search element to their engine.  Time.  You can now search for a certain “freshness” of content in Google’s cache.These search options will produce results that display only pages that Google has seen updated in that frame of time.  So if you only want to search for updates in the last day, only pages that have seen an update in the previous 24 hours that match with your keyword query will show.

The parameter is “tbs”, so you can add this to any search query and assign it a value to get these types of results.  If you wanted to search the last week of results, add “&tbs=qdr:w” to your Google query URL (not in the actual keyword entry on the site).  For example, if you’re looking for the latest info on movie reviews, you could do a query for the last 24 hours with a URL like this: “http://www.google.com/search?q=movie+reviews&tbs=qdr:d”

Now if you don’t want to mess around with URL editing, you can do it through the search engine itself by going to the “Advanced Features” from the main page, then opening up the “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” field below, then choosing what date range you would like there.  Either way will work.

If you’d like to know more details about this, you can check out the excellent post by Brian Klais on Search Engine Land.