Tech Tip For The Day: Date Range Google Searches

If you’re like me, a day rarely passes without using Google but one of the long standing issues I’ve encountered with the search engine is narrowing my search parameters by a date range. Fortunately, I ran across a method to enter a date range into a standard Google search but the only trick is the dates must be expressed as a Julian date. Fortunately, there are a few easy to use date converters out there such as the U.S. Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Department. Once you have your dates expressed in Julian format, just plug them into the Google search as “daterange:startdate-enddate” and you’re all set. I just used this method to for the custom search feature at Inside The Arts to filter out articles about the Columbus Symphony Orchestra written by resident authors over the past 10 days (the search was entered as “Refine results for Columbus daterange:2454657-2454674“). Here’s the final output.

Speaking of Inside The Arts, the slow-down problem encountered by some IE7 users has been fixed. Unfortunately, the only way to correct the problem was to use a different RSS aggregator and although the updated code now works super fast, I have some CSS styling to finish up over the next week. The good news is that all of the articles will be updated automatically and some users won’t have to wait an unbearable amount of time for the homepage to load.