Whether you think to use them or not, you probably remember that Google launched its “search options” a while back. Within these options is an option to search by timeframe.
Does Google need real-time search? Tell us what you think.
You can choose results from any time, recent results, the past 24 hours, the past week, the past year, or a specific date range.
One blogger has discovered an adjustment you can make to the URL when performing one of these searches to get near real-time results. When you search for results from the past 24 hours, you get a URL that looks something like this:
http://www.google.com/#q=Jay%20Cutler&hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:d&fp=539a9dc73a0b42d0
Ran Geva of Omgili points out that if you change the “qdr:d” to “qdr:n” to get results from the past minute. Or you can change it to “qdr:s” and get results from the past second (if there happen to be any that fresh). Geva also points out a few other substitutions:
– qdr.h – Past hour
– qdr.n10 – Past ten minutes
– qdr.s30 – Past 30 seconds
Presumably you can plug in different numbers for different time specifications.
This is close to real-time search, but not exactly “real” time. Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog explains, “Google doesn’t necessarily index web pages as soon as they’re published, but the sites that use feeds or sitemaps are indexed pretty fast. With recent advancements like PubSubHubbub that provide real-time notifications for updates, the delay between publishing pages and finding them using Google will be further reduced.”
What Geva’s finding seems to indicate is that Google is pretty close to actually offering real-time search as an option. They are not including this as a clickable option at this point, but it would not be surprising to see more closer-to-real-time options in Google’s Search Options in the near future. Google has after all, acknowledged that they need to get involved with real-time search.
Read this for some tips on getting found in real-time searches. Read this for some SEO tips for Google’s Search Options.
Will you use this URL tweak to find near real-time results on Google? Share your thoughts.
