When Google added its search options feature in May, the company made it possible for users to narrow the time parameters of their search down to the past 24 hours.
The blogosphere is abuzz this morning with the discovery of a neat little hack every user can do to get Google results up to the minute. Ran Geva, CEO of real-time search startup Omgili, stumbled upon the find Sept. 13.
When users do a search in the past 24 hours, the results come with the code parameter “qdr.d.” Geva deduced that this stood for “query data range” and tested his theory by changing the second “d” to “n” for minute and “s” for second.
He searched on results for Barack Obama. To celebrate the kick off of the National Football League’s 2009-2010 campaign, eWEEK does its own search for results on the New York Giants.
Click here to go to Google Watch to see the tests of Giants results for the past minute and even as soon as the last 30 seconds.
The revelation refires the burners under the question: If search engine startups such as Twitter, Collecta, CrowdEye, Topsy and others can offer real-time search with a fraction of Google’s resources, why can’t Google just turn this on?
Clearly, it is capable of indexing down to the second parameter. Why not push it to one second?
Read more about this topic on TechMeme here.