Google search engine possesses one of the fastest and quickest web crawler or spider in the industry, which typically able to index and rank a newly published web page or blog post in the matter of minutes. With powerful search operators that supported by Google, including ability to filter and limit search results to a time frame, Google users can now easily search for real-time results, up to last second.

In fact, Google has introduced Search Options in its search results page which allows user to drill down and narrow the results set to custom date range or time frame. The default search options gives searchers flexibility to view only web pages that been posted or published recently, during the past 24 hours, past week, past year or specific date range. These default time frame hardly constitute to be realtime though.

Google does support ability to filter and restrict search results “down to” last second, although it may not be meaningful to search only for results that been included in the last second. Anyway, use the following trick to search for Google results in almost real-time manner.

Google uses a tbs=qdr: code parameter in the URL (link location) to filter the returned search results, where qdr may means “query data range” or “query date range”. qdr switch accepts various parameters to indicate the date range which it will filter the results to. for example, “qdr:d” will search for results crawled by Google within the past 24 hours. Other parameters accepted to filter search results according to date including:

tbs=qdr:s [past second] tbs=qdr:n [past minute] tbs=qdr:h [past hour] tbs=qdr:d [past 24 hours (day)] tbs=qdr:w [past week] tbs=qdr:m [past month] tbs=qdr:y [past year]

A numerical value can be added to the end of the s, n, h, d, w, m, y to specify number of unit. For example, s30 will search past 30 seconds, n30 for past 30 minutes, h12 for past 12 hours, y2 for past 2 years.

To use the above qdr parameter to search for latest results on Google, just append the desired time value to the Google search results URL with a & operator. For example,

http://www.google.com/search?q=mydigitallife&tbs=qdr:n30

Google Realtime Search

Query above will search for all contents that appear on “mydigitallife” for past 30 minutes. To get more real time information, just appear &tbs=qdr:n or &tbs=qdr:s30 to get only results from past minutes or past 30 seconds from Google. However, one note of caution though, the shorter the time frame specified, the less results will be returning by Google.