Tip Tuesday - Dated Search Results

You've been searching for how to do this one particular thing, and right there on top of the 1st results page you get a match. You might as well have clicked on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, you think to yourself. Then you find out that the results are outdated.

Very few use Google's advanced search options, and specify a date range. But what if you don't want to specify a range, and you just want to see when the results were published?

The answer: Just add the following to the end of the URL of your search results:

&as_qdr=y15

But who's going to remember that? And to make matters even more confusing, Google's search URL could change like it has in the past.

Well, you're in luck ... A Greasemonkey script provided by filius, which some sites point out he's Stephen Gore (just trying to give proper credit), can be found at userscripts here. This is an awesome and well-written script.

However, as with all Greasemonkey scripts, this will run all the time. So what if you wanted to run it only when you needed it?

That's exactly how I wanted it too; and so I created the following bookmarklet (aka: favoritelet or favlet, for short): Google - Dated Search Results

Don't know what to do with a bookmarklet? Simply drag that link over to your browswer's toolbar. If you still don't know what I mean, check out this very short video.

The bookmarklet doesn't do any fancy URL checking beyond making sure you're on the google.com domain, it just tacks "&as_qdr=y15" (as mentioned above) onto the end of the current URL. Be sure to run it only on Google's search results page and it will prepend the results with the published date.

Whether this will display the date the "page" was first indexed or when it was edited is a point of contention, so be aware of that when you're searching. Still, it might be worth using.

This simple bookmarklet works on both of Google's search results:
New search is http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=ahmadism&btnG=Google+Search.
Old search was http://www.google.com/search?q=ahmadism

Happy searching.   ▣