Google Search Feature Tricks

22:00 on Tue, 9 Jun 2009 | Industry Comment | 0 Comments

Google’s new search options are great. It saves me a few clicks when I want to refine my search a bit.

With just two clicks, I can refine my search to only show me pages published in the last day, week, year. There is definitely something missing there. I’d love to be able to refine my search to only show pages from a period slightly larger than a week, but not as long as a year. About the length of a moon cycle perhaps? Thankfully, playing with the URL can yield you results for just the past month.

To achieve this feat, you need to edit the “&tds=qdr:w” (or “&tds=qdr:y”, “&tds=qdr:d”) to “&tds=qdr:m”, so you end up with something like this:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=why%20are%20you%20hiding%20all%20the%20features,%20Google%3F&hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enGB291GB331&sa=G&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:m

Sadly, it seems I was beaten to this discovery by almost a full moon cycle. There is talk of this workaround in a Google help thread. The thread also reveals some pretty cool features. Adding “&tds=qdr:m3”, will return all results in the last 3 months.

BONUS: As I’m feeling so generous, I’m going to give away my biggest secret. Adding “&tds=qdr:s10” will return any pages from the last 10 seconds. Scale that up and you can get minutes. Also, as a special treat, you can use “h” for hours.