Tools for Thought

By default, Google’s PageRank algorithm can be frustrating for finding recent information. The simplified explanation of PageRank is this: results are prioritized by the number of incoming links to a page with the searched keyword.

Each link is a “vote” for that page’s relevance. Like larger states in the U.S. Electoral College during an election, some links carry more weight than others. Sites with more links that link to another page pass on more “link juice,” or PageRank, to that page than sites with fewer links.

Reverse ageism

Compared to the pre-Google days of search engines manually indexing sites, the relevance of search results has vastly improved. But sometimes a search that keys on popularity is a disadvantage. Suppose there’s an “it” toy for Christmas that hasn’t yet been released. You want to track the latest news on it, but you want to do it by searching at your discretion rather than cluttering your inbox with Google Alert notifications.

Searching the product name will usually bring up the company product page, followed by other results with more marketing than substance. Drop “iPhone” into Google, and the first page’s search results are the most popular ones that have been around long enough to accrue the most links, not the latest news from Engadget or TechCrunch.

Standard date-filtered searches

The two main ways to get more recent results in Google are to use that Advanced Search page or the daterange operator. Advanced Search is definitely more palatable. You put in your search term, click the plus sign next to “Date, usage rights, numeric range and more,” to make these options visible, then select the “date” from the dropdown menu. “Date” is actually a time frame specification, allowing you to select the past 24 hours, the past week, the past month or the past year. I’ll use “date” and “date range” in the literal and figurative senses interchangeably.

For anyone but hardcore geeks, daterange is a horror show. To search a keyword (i.e. a word or phrase) within a specific date range, the syntax is [keyword] daterange:[first Julian date]-[last Julian date]. The Julian date is the number of days that have elapsed since January 1, 4713 BC. Today’s Julian date is 2454790. The Google API likes to make like easy for computers, not humans.

A date search worth bookmarking

Here’s how I use the Advanced Search without the annoyance of clicking on the link to get to it and expanding the date option menu.

1. From the Google page, click Advanced Search
2. Enter the single-quote ( ‘ ) character in the main search field
3. Expand the “Date, usage rights . . .” menu and select “past 24 hours” from the Date menu
4. Run the search.
5. Bookmark the result page. The result will say “Your search – ‘ – did not match any documents,” which is fine
6. Notice that search box on the result page has a date dropdown menu next to it. That’s the reason for bookmarking this page
7. Optional: create a keyword shortcut for this page that allows you to access it from the address bar. I Firefox, go to Bookmarks, find the bookmark you just created, right-click it and select Properties. In the Keyword box, enter a keyword (I just use the single-quote) and click Save Changes. Now you can get to this page by hitting Ctrl-L and typing the keyword into the address bar
8. Do a search. For an exact string search, add another single-quote at the end of it (that was the reason for bookmarking the single-quote search result). For a regular keyword search, hit the backspace key to clear the single-quote character before entering your keywords. Then select your date range from the menu and click search

That’s it. The next time you need to track time-sensitive information, filter out the older results with this bookmarked page.

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