Google Date range searching

Have you ever tried Google’s date range searching and been annoyed with the results – did it come up with old pages when you only wanted recent ones? I certainly did and stopped ever using date range searching. Hopefully thats a thing of the past now though. As of May this year Google changed the date range syntax slightly. Before Google date marked a page when it was added to the Index AND whenever it was refreshed in the Index, i.e. when it gets reindexed. Now things have changes so that a webpage is only found on one date only – the one when it was originally added to Google’s index.

What does this mean? Well if you were searching for stories on, lets say, HIV Integrase inhibitors, now you only get webpages that were created in the last 3 months, as opposed to news stories that were published 5 years ago and are part of a web page that was updated in the last 3 months. It’s not fail safe – after all maybe Google, for whatever reason, only recently indexed an old page for the first time in the last 3 months, but on the whole it seems to work pretty well.