Chocolate-covered Altoids to SEO Roundtable for pointing to the new options in Google’s advanced search. The advanced search page now allows you to search pages added in the last 24 hours and 2 months, in addition to the 1, 3, 6, and 12 months.

And of course I can’t leave that alone. If you want to do any more you can hack the results URL. The switch for specifying how recently you want to search the index is &as_qdr= . The variables are d (day), w (week), m (month) and y (year). So if you ran a search and added &as_qdr=d to the end, you’d get only results from those pages added to the Google index in the last 24 hours.

If you want to search multiple days, weeks, months, etc, add a number after the variable. Searching 2 days is &as_qdr=d2. Searching 3 weeks is &as_qdr=w3, and so on. Now when you start goofing around with the result URLs, odd things can happen. I found there was tremendous difference between just one day and two days’ indexing. I also found that for one search I did, a search for results indexed anytime (the search was cow) actually produced fewer results than a search for pages found/indexed in the past year.

One more thing about the advanced search page: the file format search now includes Google Earth files in addition to the Microsoft Office, Rich Text Format, etc files.