Sort search results by date
How do I search for articles within a specific date range? How do I direct that they be displayed by date (newest first)?
Svi odgovori (7)
Hi, different search websites offer different features. For example:
- Yahoo: there is a control on the line below the search box which says Anytime. Click that to get some additional choices.
- Google: you need to click the "Search Tools" button below the search box to open a bar that has date options. Google allows you to specify a custom range (e.g., 1/1/2014-12/31/2014). It also has a sort control after you select your date range.
But... the way search engines derive dates from web pages can lead to lots of errors in date range searches. You definitely cannot trust their accuracy.
If you mean the SUMO knowledge base articles of this website then that isn't possible.
cor-el said
If you mean the SUMO knowledge base articles of this website then that isn't possible.
Well, this means that the rest of us in this world have to continue putting up with all of the "junk" links out there dated 1999 or whatever! If everyone is researching a topic based upon the most recent data, then a "Data Search" feature would be most helpful instead of returning 1000 hits on out of date information which will take hours if not days to pour over.
Hi sbailey7444, what search site(s) do you like to use for your research? I'm sure each of them has a method for providing feedback, or a volunteer might be aware of a workaround.
Hi: I typically research several sites for my business and other purposes. There might be 50 such sites I visit on a regular basis and then others I visit once for information. I just do not wish to have 40 hits with many of them 3+ years old. I need the most current information and sure that many others in the world also would like to be able to sort a site search by order of most recent date published or updated. Can find no Firefox add-on which addresses this request.
sbailey7444 said
Hi: I typically research several sites for my business and other purposes. There might be 50 such sites I visit on a regular basis and then others I visit once for information. I just do not wish to have 40 hits with many of them 3+ years old. I need the most current information and sure that many others in the world also would like to be able to sort a site search by order of most recent date published or updated. Can find no Firefox add-on which addresses this request.
I have not searched for an add-on that can screen old results out of a list of results. If you want to experiment, you could look here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/
What is your experience with Google's date range limits? What I'm referring to is the date range selector available from the Search Tools bar. In my experience, Google often seems to be tricked by dates in a page that are not the actual date of first publication or the last update of the actual content (versus a "today's date" field in the page). Since Google cannot do this well in its own results, even with its encyclopedic knowledge of what people read and how web pages are structured, I'm doubtful that a multi-site add-on could do it effectively.
But... don't give up because many add-ons (or web-based services) are born from a need such as yours. I suggest keeping notes as you go. When you open a page, you likely are consider multiple cues as to its age, including a date at the beginning or end of the main content, or in the URL. Some sites also send a last modified date header, which you can view in the Page Info dialog. For each site you care about, where do you look? What would an add-on or service need to check to get you the results you want?
A lot of pages are generated dynamically these days by server software and in such a case the time stamp is of the day the search engine has visited the website. If the server behaves this way then there is not much a search engine can do about this apart from seeing that the page content hasn't changed since the last visit and may decide to keep the previous time stamp.