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Bing’s Updated Date Searching

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Bing Date Search LimitBing has had date searching available for some time now, but it had been frustrating to use since the date limit options did not always show up at the top of the search results page. For my searching, it only showed up as an option when I did not want it and the date limit did not show up when I would have like to use it. For the last week or so, Bing has finally changed that and it now shows up on all of the search results, or at least on all of my searches.

In the past, I recommended switching over to Yahoo! which uses the Bing database and always showed a date limit for ease of adding the date limit. Now I have one less reason to use Yahoo! for searching and can use Bing instead. To get to the limit, run a search at Bing and then use the drop down limits available above the search results and under the search box. Four options are available:

  • All
  • Past 24 hours
  • Past week
  • Past month

I do wish that they would also include “past year” like Google  has (and the one that I probably use the most frequently). I’d also like to see the custom date option. Bing has the ability to add more limits, but for now at least they must be added by hand at the end of a Bing search results URL. The following codes can be used at Bing (and Google, usually):

  • past second: &tbs=qdr:s
  • past minute: &tbs=qdr:n
  • past hour: &tbs=qdr:h
  • past day: &tbs=qdr:d
  • past week: &tbs=qdr:w
  • past month: &tbs=qdr:m
  • past year: &tbs=qdr:y

I don’t find the second and minute ones that useful (and quite inaccurate), but I do wish that the past year would be added to the drop-down menu. Now that the three-option date limit is showing on all results, some are finally seeing it and make it sound like a new feature. That is the difference that having it always available makes.

Why the change at Bing? In part, I think it may be due to others complaining about the frequent lack of the date limit. I also wonder (and hope) that Bing has improved its date identification. One of the problems with date searching is that it has not always been easy to clearly identify the date of the content on a web page. Google has made major efforts over the years to better understand page content dates. Early search engine efforts relied on the date and time stamps of the file, but content management systems could be easily set up to constantly update the dates of static pages and server-side scripting also masked the date stamp since every page was created on request. With more blog posts and news media sites including date stamps within the text and dated comments giving data information, the pages can be better parsed for date. It is still not a perfect process, and I find plenty of examples which are inaccurately listed as being more current than they really are. However, overall Google does much better with date identification than it did several years ago, and I find myself using the date limit frequently. My hope for Bing is that they are also more accurately identifying dates and felt that it had improved enough that it could be rolled out on all search results pages.


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