At the Searcher Academy pre-conference workshop at Internet Librarian 2018 conference this year, I learned a clever trick from Greg Notess for conducting an advanced search in Google News.
When you’re just using Google web search (e.g., Google.com), along the top of the search results page is a button labeled “Tools”; click it and you’ll get a pull-down menu labeled “Any time” that lets you limit your search to results updated within the past hour, past 24 hours, past week, and so on. It’s a nifty option and I frequently use it to limit my searches to the past two years.
Google News doesn’t offer a similar option, so you can’t easily limit a search in Google News by date. If you type a query in the search box at the top of Google News, you may retrieve articles from weeks or months ago. As Greg pointed out, the way around this is to start your search in Google.com. In the search results page, click the link for News, then click Tools. Bingo – there’s a pull-down menu labeled “Recent” that lets you limit your search by date. I have been surprised by how many times this little trick has come in handy over the last couple of weeks. Thanks, Greg!
Interesting – as I’ve always searched this way so hadn’t noticed that news.google.com didn’t include a time option. I only use this if I’m looking for a specific sort of news using their left-column selection options (science, sport, entertainment, etc.).
Some of these you also get with the “blog” selection option in the Tools menu too.
Me too, Arthur! It wasn’t until I learned about this from Greg that I realized it was something I needed.
Oops. The other way round. I always searched Greg’s way as I normally check “All” as well as “News” so start with “All”. Only when it’s something very specific do I start with “news.google.com” so I never realised that this was missing off that option. I’ve always depended on the date option as it’s very rare I want something that’s not date dependent.
If you’ve not tried the “blog” option under “All News” that’s also useful. Not as good as the old (really old) blog search Google had, but sort of OK.
I could have used this tip just a few days ago. Thanks for sharing. I always learn something new from you!
Thanks (and thanks to Greg Notess for showing it to me). It’s one of those things that you really appreciate once you discover it.