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Have you noticed that we now have more "Date" choices from Google's Advanced Search menu? I hardly use the advanced search because I can use more commands directly from within the main interface, plus I'm a big fan of injecting the commands directly into the URL path. But now you can limit your search to return results from only:
- Part 24 hours
- Past Week
- Past Month
- Past 2 Months
- Past 3 Months
- Past 6 Months
- Past Year
For example, search for: Kennedy Orlando Conference and select the "Past 24 hours" mode like this.
But the fun doesn't stop there.
If you take a look at that URL - (hint: copy and paste into WordPad or notepad) you will find a qdr command close to the end in the SQL sequence like this:
&as_qdr=d
The ampersand (&) means its an "appended command" per say, then the "as_" part means this is an "Advanced Search" feature, the "q" means query and the "dr" means "Date Return." Finally, the = precedes the time frame you want to search.
In this case "d" equals one day, which is of course 24 hours. You will notice that in the search results page you now see a dropdown with the original time frame choices.
What you can do from here though is instead of using that drop down to modify your time frame search, you can instead add stuff to the right of the d. For example, edit the URL to say &as_qdr=d3 instead, and you now have a search for the past three days which is not actually a drop down choice.
Play around with this and you will notice you can make it just about any amount of days you want.
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
And you will only read this here, I think? If you select Past Week or Past Month from the drop down you will notice the "dr" changes from a "=d" modifier (for days) to a "=w" modifier for weeks or an "=m" modifier (for months).
This means you can search for the past two weeks of crawled data by entering =w2 instead, which is again not a choice on the drop down, and of course the same applies to months like =m4.
You know me, I have to take this all the way to the end... so you can theoretically still do this for "years" by using =y2 for two years though that starts to return quite a few results and I'm not sure of the practicality.
WARNING: Just because you are limiting your search to a specific period of time doesn't mean those pages will be fresh. Many dynamically generated web pages appear to be as fresh as hot bread coming out of the oven but its only because they have a JavaScript that changes the date and time on the page, or it could also be an old blog post with recent comments for example.