Here is a tip that I think people sometimes overlook but can pay huge dividend when used correctly! :+)
Google has done such a good job in providing great search results sometimes we take it for granted and become lazy in thinking about basic search strategy.
Google by default returns results sorted by relevancy based on its ranking algorism that includes the now famous “PageRank” algorism. Now whilst nobody really knows the secret source/formula Google use in its ranking algorism, it is understood that freshness or time dimension plays an important part. In addition, Google also give you the option to control the date range or how recent the page is in the advanced search options, use it to supplement your search query when you know timeliness of a result set plays a critical role in terms of relevancy.
By selecting the date range, you can restrict you search result to pages created or updated within the last 24 hours. week, month or year. This operator is invaluable for certain types of search as sometimes instead of dreaming up keywords to include or exclude, it’s much more effective to limit and control the time elements.
For example, as you searching for information about a newly released gadget that’s only been out on the market for a month. Restricting your search to pages created or update within the last month is going to dramatically help you filter out material not related to this particular release of the product without mucking around too much with product version and keywords.
By the way, if the time dimension or freshness of a source is very important to you when searching, chances are you should also leverage other sources of more timely search engines where time plays a more important factors. These include News search sites such as Google News, various Blog search engines and Twitter search for searching through more update to date web contents and near-realtime web conversations.
Once again, thinking beyond keywords when it comes to intelligently structuring you search query can make your life easier as well as make your search much more effective :+)
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Good Idea and great tip!
If you don’t like using the advanced search page (though it has gotten better in the past year), or if you want to search for an unusual amount of time (such as everything from the beginning of the month to today–21 days), you can do so by adding information to the URL. Run your search, then go to the end of the URL in the address bar. Add &as_qdr=d21 and hit enter. In this case, d21 means “21 days.” You can do that with m (months), d (days), w (weeks), and y (years).
You can see a full description here: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/easy-way-to-find-recent-web-pages.html
Also, you need to know that the date in question is not necessarily the date on which the content was created, but the date on which Google first crawled it. So, if on April 15th Google crawled a site written in 1999, it would show up today as being 6 days old.
Not perfect, but still very, very cool!
Great tip researchwell!!
I guess I need to look into the Google search URL a bit more for more search secrets!