Have your ever wanted to limit your Google search results based on a time window? You might have wanted to do this in a number of occasions. One can imagine how interesting this time limited search can be.
Google has a couple of options to search query based on a date/time. Here are two ways to do that smartly. Let us learn a few more tips to search Google efficiently.
How to Search Google Within a Specific Date Range?
One can use Google’s Advanced Search option. Click on “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” in advanced search. It will give you options to search within a day, a month, a week, and a year.
If you want to do Google search using a specific dates you have in mind, Google has a nice syntax you can use. This feature is very useful for searching some news within some time window of interest. The syntax that does date specific search is daterange.
However, the problem in using daterange is that it does not understand the way we write dates. Both ”mm/dd/year” and “dd/mm/year” formats won’t work with daterange
Google’s daterange Uses Julian Date
You should convert the date to a format called Julian date. Julian date is a single number, it does not split a date into month/days/year. Julian date is basically the total number of days since January 1 4713 B.C. One can easily convert a given date to Julian date online. Just use the integer form of Julian date to search.
The way to use daterange with Julian dates is
Your_Query daterange:<startdate>-<enddate>
Here is a sample search for the query “iPad” in the date range 5th April 2005- 5th April 2007.
Warning: The key to remember is that the time stamp Google uses to search is the time when Google indexed the page (not the time the page was created). This may generate weird meaningless results. Also, it seems to give weird results if one digs deep in the past.
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