Google experts, ease my searching woes! (pre-enter date, etc.)

Google is so smart and sophisticated, there has to be a way to do this.

I probably use google an average of 50 times a day. 40 of those times, I want results from the past year, not 2005.

I am sick to death of searching, remembering that it won’t give me the most recent unless I ask, clicking on “search tools” then clicking on “Past year”.

I looked into the help and tips, but nothing popped out at me, and I logged in to one of my google accounts and checked my search settings, but nothing there either. (It seems like such a no-brainer to have that as a setting…) So I figure there must be some kind of power-search way to get it out of the way in the original search, similar to searching on a particular site (trees site: plantland) or Boolean (raining cats NOT dogs). Something like “best touchpad date: past year” - if there is I could set up a macro for it so that it wouldbe almost seamless.

So am I dreaming?

Make a new search keyword (Firefox)/search engine (Chrome) and add “&tbs=,qdr:y” to the end of the URL to search through the last year, “&tbs=,qdr:m” for the last month.

Thank you very much… but I don’t quite understand the set up… “Make a new search keyword (Firefox)/search engine (Chrome)”

???

To make it easier, you can go here in Firefox, right-click the search field, and “Add a Keyword for this search”.

Or you can make a new search engine in the search bar… whichever method suits you best.

Sorry for not being clear; I was in a rush.

As far as I know, there is no way to add this as a text option to a regular Google search query.

Instead, you either have to add it to a custom search engine or a search keyword.

Which browser do you use? You can either Google for instructions – “How to add a search engine/keyword in browser X” – or I’ll try to give better instructions later on.

I’m pretty web savvy but I don’t know what this means either.

ETA: or in your follow-up, what a “custom search engine” is in context of a browser.

A search keyword is a type of bookmark that lets you search directly from your address bar.

For example, instead of typing “www.google.com” in the address bar and then searching from Google’s home page, a keyword lets you type “g blah blah blah” directly into the address bar and it’ll show you the search results for “blah blah blah”. Or “amz blah blah” to search on Amazon, etc. Customizing this with something like “gy” could let you search Google results in the past year.

In Firefox, a “search engine” is any of several options (Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, etc.) that you can search from the search bar (CTRL-K). In Firefox, the search bar is a distinct entity from the address bar.

To make matters more confusing, in Chrome the search bar and address bar are combined into one, and what Firefox calls a keyword, Chrome calls a search engine. Chrome doesn’t have a separate search bar in the Firefox fashion.

I didn’t come up with these terms and they’re horribly confusing, ambiguous, and unclear, but there you have it.

Anyway, depending on which browser Stoid is using, I can provide more specific instructions.

I use many, but 75% its firefox, then Safari, then Chrome.

I may be misunderstanding the question, but after doing a Google search, on the left side of the screen the following menu appears. Wouldn’t clicking “past year” after performing a search accomplish the same thing?

ETA - I found a way to do it as part of the search directly here.

In Firefox, go to this page.

At the top, in the search box, click “Add a keyword to this search”. Give it a name, maybe “gy”, and click ok.

Then, to use this, click on the address bar and type “gy whatever you want to search for”.


In Chrome, follow the instructions on this page. For step 4, the URL you need is:



http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=,qdr:y


Give it a similar name and use it the same way as above.


I don’t know how you do it with Safari, sorry. Not really an Apple fan.

I think she was asking for a way to not have to click that every time because she was forgetting to.

That’s similar to adding &tbs=,qdr:y, except it lets you specify a specific year range instead of the previous 365 days.

Yeah I was just commenting at least on my google results page I don’t need to go into a special menu as the OP indicates, the choices are just right there next to the results to re-filter them based on different dates, etc.

Both URL methods seem cumbersome to me compared to this one-click post-search option. But I guess potentially they could be time-saving if it comes up often enough.

By jove someone seems to have it! Thanks to some of the things learned in this thread I found THIS!

Don’t understand how it works, just understand that it does.

Now if I could apply it to all browsers…