Google For Dummies

Finding the Freshest Google

Google is not particularly strong at letting you determine the freshness of search results. The vagueness surrounding page freshness is due to several reasons:

• Google uses more than spiders to crawl the Web, and more than one type of spider. (See Chapter 12 for more about spiders and Web crawling.) These crawlers operate at different speeds and different depths. It’s possible for a newly created Web page to go undetected by one crawl and then turn up in the index two weeks later after a deeper crawl.

• Google uses more than one server (Internet computer) to deliver search results. The servers are not perfectly synchronized. At any moment, one server might give slightly different search results than another server. This fact, plus the multiple spiders, results in what observers call the Google dance. Later in this chapter I point you to a few sites that allow you to track the Google dance.

• The freshness of a page is determined by the time it was created, or the time it was added to Google’s index, or both.

Google does enable a certain degree of freshness filtering on the Advanced Search page in Web search. (An advanced search in Google Groups lets you specify dates exactly because newsgroup posts are dated more precisely than Web pages. See Chapter 4.) On the Advanced Search page, you can ask for Web pages updated within the past three months, six months, or year. These large time frames are safe for Google, because the three variables just listed cause confusion only within time periods shorter than three months.

An alternate Google engine called GooFresh invites you to fine-tune the freshness setting by drastically narrowing the time frame. GooFresh is located here:

www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml

GooFresh accomplishes the time-narrowing trick by using the daterange operator. I don’t discuss this operator much in this book because daterange doesn’t understand dates formatted in a typical fashion — month, day, and year. Google understands only the Julian date system, which involves long and cryptic strings of numbers. Online Julian date converters are available for use with the daterange operator. If you do so, you are still subject to the Google dance depending on when a page is added to the index and when it hits all the servers.

Assuming that your freshness needs aren’t too precise or imperative, GooFresh is a fine alternative. Figure 14-2 shows the GooFresh page ready to launch a search. The search results look completely normal and are drastically narrowed compared to an undated search. A recent search for the keyword internet, which normally returns hundreds of thousands of results, yielded only three when GooFresh looked for pages added on the current day.

Figure 14-2: The GooFresh interface to Google, where you can find Web sites freshly added to the Google index.