How to Always Show Dates in Google Search Results

booleanstrings Boolean, Google 5 Comments

Would you like to see the dates of the search results on Google? By all means, it’s a useful piece of information.

If you narrow a Google search to (any) date range, using the drop-down selection for the date range, the dates are shown. You can then also choose to sort by date if you wanted, to see the most recent results first.

dates

When a date range is selected, the Google search URL is changed to reflect this.

Now, here’s how to always see the dates for the results. Search for something first, then add this to the search URL & press Enter: &tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/0

This is what it will look like:

dates1

The starting date, that I set up this way (“1/1/0”), is w-a-a-a-y in the past. 🙂 Now, each search result promptly displays the date. You can try this search here: filetype:pdf member list healthcare association

If you use Chrome, you can make Google search to automatically show the dates. In Chrome, set up the default search engine to Google and add the above magical piece of the URL &tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/0 to it.

search

Then, for any search started in the address bar and any search of a selection will have the dates displayed. (You can also add other URL tweaks to the default search – for example, add &filter=0 to see “the omitted” results.)

You can still jump on tomorrow’s Google-Based Sourcing Practice Session to experience this and many other techniques with us interactively.

 

Comments 5

  1. I tried this several times but it didn’t work for me — in Chrome. I even tried changing the & to AND but couldn’t get it to work. Any ideas?

  2. Still works perfectly fine in 2021. Great tip.
    Chrome > Settings > Search Engine > Manage Search Engines > Default Search Engine > Google (Default) > Keyword :

    google.com&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/0

    1. Post
      Author

      Thank you! Note though that some pages “do not have dates”, i.e. Google is unable to identify the date for a page. There are lots of thos – for example, many LinkedIn public profiles. Those no-date pages disappear from the results as soon as you do a date restriction.

  3. Thank you, been using this shortcut for years! Works great for graduate school research projects that require I know the date of last webpage update. Thank you!

    Suggestion for previous user who could not get it to work: go to google search page and just paste it at the end of what exists there, do not edit the google address shown before pasting it on the end (that is your log in info). Test it, when it works hit the back button and then bookmark google page with it on the end. That way you just hit the bookmarked preconfigured search page to get the date anytime you need it!

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