Bing’s “Narrow By Date” Search Tool

Today’s post is day 8 of the 31 day Bing Challenge, where I’ve completely cut myself off from Google, to focus on Bing, for the entire month of March, 2011. Since I’m examining Bing’s search tools, features and options this week, I decided to spend today taking a look at the “Narrow By Date” search tool. So far, 8 days down and only 23 more to go.

 
Day 8: Narrow By Date – Tuesday, March 8th

Often when I am researching a trending topic, I will use a search feature like Bing’s Narrow By Date filter options to find content that is more current. This helps save time in reviewing posts and articles that may contain info that is no longer accurate.

This is not a search tool that is unique to Bing, but it has a few aspects that make different.

1. It doesn’t appear on every SERP. It seems to be omitted from more general queries. Possibly in order to make the searcher try another query before narrowing by date.

2. There is a timestamp tag on to results that indicate how long ago their were published, indexed and/or the page was updated. This is a nice way to let searchers know how fresh the listing is.

3. The default option for displaying search results regardless of time is of course All Results.

4. The Past 24 hours option pulls only recent content published in the last day that Bing has indexed. It is worth noting that these searches often contain lower quality content due to the fact that these SERPs contain smaller sampling sizes and, by nature of timing, fewer data points (like links) to gauge a URL’s quality. Also, content published within the past 24 hours, that Bing has not yet spidered and added to their index, will not show up for these searches.

5. The Past Week option is a good choice for finding fresher content of higher quality, especially for hot trending topics. Since Bing spiders and indexes new URL’s at a slower rate than Google, Past Week searches will give you a better collection of new webpages.

6. The Past Month is a little less reliable for finding new content. Since this “Narrow By Date” feature pulls pages that have been updated within the selected timeframe, the monthly option is heavily weighted to older content than fresh pages.

23 more days left…

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What do you think of the Bing’s Narrow By Date tool? Feel free to leave a comment.

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