Double Parity

More and more, I find that I only want fresh results when Googling. For general or historical information, Wikipedia is my preferred starting point. For current developments, however, Google is the better tool. More specifically, [Google's Advanced Search][as] is a better tool. The Advanced Search options give me the ability to filter results by date. So I can just see the relevant links from the last month, week, or even 24 hours.

[as]: http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Unfortunately, unlike Google’s [advanced search operators][so], the date filter cannot be specified in the search string. Having to manually click and choose the date from the pull-down menu each time is a real pain. Thankfully, because the search options are encoded into the URL, we can use Firefox’s keyword feature to set up a nice “Search Recent” shortcut.

[so]: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

If you run an advanced search and look at the resulting URL, you’ll see that there are a bunch of options you can specify. For limiting the date range, the option we want is *as_qdr* (query date range?). So I go to my Firefox Bookmarks Manager and create a new bookmark, open its properties, and fill in the various fields.

The image above shows my bookmark for searches limited to the last week. Here’s the full URL of the bookmark:

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=%s&hl=en&num=50&as_qdr=w&safe=off

Through Firefox’s keyword feature, I can access this search by typing “gw search-terms” in the browser’s address bar. So to find out the latest BioShock news, for example, I simply enter “gw BioShock” into the address bar. All text following the keyword (“gw”) replaces the %s in the bookmark URL.

To change the date range to the last day, month, or year, replace the argument of as_qdr with “d”, “m”, or “y” respectively. To get results from the last 3 months, use “m3″. For the last 3 days, use “d3″. I think you get the idea.

Note that I’ve included two extra options in the bookmark. The “num=50″ option specifies that I want 50 results per page. The “safe=off” bit disables any filtering of the search results.