Google Plain Sight Secret: How to Tell Google to Return Only Recent Results

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Sep 18, 2007

Google offers a cool advanced search technique that you can use to find out which new pages Google discovered on your website in recent days. You can also use the same technique to find any new web content on a topic, such as a breaking news story.

Google's advanced date search allows you to append a parameter to your query to specify that it only return results that have Googlebot has discovered in the past X days. For example, suppose that you want to see all of the new stories discovered in the past day about the armed robbery that a sports memorabilia dealer has accused O.J. Simpson of committing:

http://www.google.com/search?q=oj+simpson+robbery&as_qdr=d1

By adding the &_as_qdr=d1 variable to your query, you're telling Google to only bring back pages discovered in the past 1 day (d1). You can simply type this query in the URL after you've completed your search, or if you like a GUI approach, you can use the Advanced Search function on the Google website. It looks like this:

You can also use this technique to find which pages Google has indexed on your website within the past 30 days. This can be helpful as part of your overall SEO/SEM strategy, especially if you're publishing time-sensitive content, such as technology news, that you don't think Google is indexing in a timely manner.