Big google search improvement: date range

Matt Cutts tells us that Google's advanced search now offers real date range search -- but then tells the real secret -- how to craft URLs that embed time-based searches:

Useful Google feature: better date search:

...This little tweak is as handy as “&strip=1″ on cache: queries and “&filter=0″ on site: queries. Why? It’s an easy way to see new urls that Google has just discovered in the last few days.

For example, there’s been a lot of fast progress on iphone stuff recently. A query such as http://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+source+code&as_qdr=d1 would show all the new urls for the query [iphone source code] within the last day, because d1 stands for 1 day.

Suppose you wanted to see all the new urls that Google found on your site within the last 7 days. For the domain mattcutts.com, I’d use a query such as http://www.google.com/search?q=site:mattcutts.com&as_qdr=d7 to find those urls (remember, “d” stands for days and “7″ stands for, well, 7).

Previously, you could check whether Google had indexed a new url by (say) searching for content from that url, so this isn’t completely new, but it still simplifies life for site owners.

Honestly, this is big. The one thing I most wanted from Google search was date range information; many technical searches are frustrated by scads of outdated articles. The challenge will be to see if they can keep this working despite the best efforts of the usual parasites ...

PS. The iPhone source code example is cute.