Matt Cutts On Google's 'Better Date Search'

In Matt's official blog, an article called 'Useful Google feature: better date search' has reference to 'Easy Way to Find Recent Web Pages' where Ionut Alex Chitu talks about date-based searching.

Anyway, about Matt's post, he says:

"The shortest time frame used to be something like three months; now you can look for things that are less than 24 hours old. What GoogleOS noticed is that the advanced date search affects a url parameter called “as_qdr” and Chitu figured out some of the possible values:

The nice thing is that you can change the value of as_qdr to custom intervals. Here are all the possible values of the as_qdr parameter:

• d[number] – past number of days (e.g.: d10)
• w[number] – past number of weeks
• y[number] – past number of years

This little tweak is as handy as “&strip=1″ on cache: queries and “&filter=0″ on site: queries. Why? It’s an easy way to see new urls that Google has just discovered in the last few days.

For example, there’s been a lot of fast progress on iphone stuff recently. A query such as http://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+source+code&as_qdr=d1 would show all the new urls for the query [iphone source code] within the last day, because d1 stands for 1 day.

Suppose you wanted to see all the new urls that Google found on your site within the last 7 days. For the domain mattcutts.com, I’d use a query such as http://www.google.com/search?q=site:mattcutts.com&as_qdr=d7 to find those urls (remember, “d” stands for days and “7″ stands for, well, 7). Previously, you could check whether Google had indexed a new url by (say) searching for content from that url, so this isn’t completely new, but it still simplifies life for site owners."

For more, read Useful Google feature: better date search.

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