Realtime Search with Google

There’s some cool stuff going on with realtime queries at Google.

As you may already know, you can use search options within Google results to filter by date. Using this you can get stuff in large time chunks, like within the past week, or month, or year.

And it’s possible to tweak those parameters by simply adding numbers to them. So, for a default “past week” query you’ll get something like this in the URL bar:

http://www.google.com/search?q=mms&hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:w

Notice the “w” there. It stands for week, and if you change that to “month” you’ll get results from one month ago to now. If you add a number after the time increment you’ll get that many of that increment, like so:

But Google has just made things much more interesting by adding finer increments. They now take hours and minutes–and even seconds–as time parameters.

So, instead of qdr:w for week, you can now do qdr:n30 for 30 minutes (n=minutes). You can also do s for seconds.

Cool stuff. ::