Legal Research

Google Date-Limited Search

By Simon Fodden

You’ll have noticed that on the revamped Google Advanced Search page there’s a link that will expand into a drop-down menu, letting you select whether you want results from pages that have been indexed for the first time — i.e. pages newly discovered by Google, which will likely be brand new pages but needn’t be, of course — in the last day, week, month etc. (See the Research Buzz post from a year ago for more on what the dating means.)

You can customize your searches by altering the date range component at the end of the search string. The parameter is as_qdr and it takes the following variables for days, weeks, months and years: d[number], w[number], m[number] and y[number]. Thus a search string for pages including the search term salami first indexed in the last ten days would be http://www.google.ca/search?q=salami&as_qdr=d10, for example.

[via Google Operating System]

I’ve come across a simple bookmarklet that may help a bit in all of this: javascript:window.open(document.URL + “&as_qdr=d”) When you have done a regular search in Google, you can click the bookmarklet to bring the date range dropdown menu to the search results page, letting you filter the initial results by day, week, month etc. If you regularly want to search within a custom range, you can alter the parameter in the Javascript as described above. (As with all Javascript, your mileage may vary depending on browser and operating system.)

[via Mac OS X Hints]

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 01, 2008 (boomark / email).