Toolkit Addition

Search Engine Watch

It's simple. Bookmark Search Engine Watch. Danny Sullivan, the editor, has been monitoring the development and evolution of search engines since the beginning.

Rather than blather on about how useful Danny's material is, we suggest that you see for yourself!

Search Tips

Search Tip: Date Queries

Once you've perfected and bookmarked a query, you will only want to see certain subsets of the data. There's no real sense in continually looking at the same potential candidates.

Slowly, all of the search engines are perfecting the ability to search within date ranges. Here are the basic terms and their usage. Most search engines that allow Boolean queries will accept them!

after:(day)/(month)/(year)

Restricts a search to documents created or modified after the specified date. For example:

objective AND experience AND after: 15/1/98

will find docs with the words objective and experience in the body which were posted or modified after January 15, 1998.

before:(day)/(month)/(year)

Restricts a search to documents created or modified before the specified date. For example,

objective AND experience AND before 30/1/97

will find you documents posted or modified before January 1, 1999.

within:(number)/(unit)

Restricts a search to documents created or modified within the last specified time period. For example,

objective AND experience AND within:3/months

will return docs within the last 3 months. Units can be days, months, or years.

Currently, these date queries will only function correctly if they are used as a single term within a Boolean clause, without any pluses or minuses. So

(+objective + experience) AND within:8/months

will work, however,

+objective + experience +within:3/months

will not.