Near-Real-time search on Google
Did you ever want to know what’s happening on the internet in real-time? Yes you say, I use Twitter! Well good for you, I guess I can’t teach you anything new since you already know everything… So go on and don’t read the rest of the post because you are so smart and successful…
OK, you are still here. Good! By now you probably know about the “Search Options” feature Google introduced in May. One of its features is to limit the search results by time frame. By default the available time frames are: Any time, Past year, Past week, Recent results and Past 24 hours. Past 24 hours is nice but still far away from Real-time. What Google isn’t telling you is that you can search in the past minute and even in the past second. The trick is to change a parameter in the URL that will narrow down the time frames. Let take a look at a simple example:
Search for Barack Obama in the past 24 hours:
http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:d&tbo=1
Notice the URL parameter qdr:d. I assume qdr stands for Query Date Range (sounds about right). All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s.
Past Minute:
http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:n&tbo=1
Search results from the past minute
Past second:
http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:s&tbo=1
Couldn’t find any result – but hey it’s in the past second, how cool is that?
Oh and of course there is also “Past hour” – but that’s old news:
http://www.google.com/search?q=omgili&hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:h
UPDATE:
You can also set a time frame in minutes like past 10 minutes:
http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:n10&tbo=1
or past 30 seconds:
http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:s30&tbo=1
Just add a number after the appropriate time frame (h = hours, n = minutes, s = seconds). For example: qdr:n10 will return results from the past 10 minutes.
“Netcraft confirms it – Twitter is dying” 
Ran Geva,
Omgili CEO
well done. it’s in time for me, at least. tks
Comment by shaul — September 13, 2009 @ 8:43 pm
far out! thanks, might be fun to play with…
Comment by mark baard — September 14, 2009 @ 12:01 am
now to get google to add some ajax magic, and have new search results fade in as they get indexed…
Comment by turn.self.off — September 14, 2009 @ 2:14 am
That’s not real time search. That’s just showing you content that’s been recently added within seconds. The content itself could be minutes to hours old. Real time search to me means finding content that was published in real time:
http://searchengineland.com/what-is-real-time-search-definitions-players-22172
Comment by Danny Sullivan — September 14, 2009 @ 2:32 am
@Danny: You are completely right! That’s why I wrote “near” real time in the title. The only one who can make real time is the one that owns the content like Google…
Still, it is a great way to find information on any resource (not only Twitter) with the most powerful search engine out there as fast as we possibly can…
Comment by ran — September 14, 2009 @ 7:55 am
Thanks! I’ve made a few filters on http://www.soople.com, so people can use it without having to ‘hack’ the url, like my mom
An not all visitors (based on country/language) can see the search options at all.
Comment by Floris — September 14, 2009 @ 10:29 am
Nice.
Comment by ian — September 14, 2009 @ 2:27 pm
and the last micro second ?
Comment by boris — September 14, 2009 @ 2:49 pm
Really cool tips! or hack? Thanks for sharing it.
Comment by mathieu Elie — September 14, 2009 @ 9:40 pm
Awesome.
I mean your Twitter dig; just what are those folks thinkin?
‘Gotta go pee…’ is news?
This tip was great. My wife is a social scientist, time stamping events is hard but this tool can do that and is very sweet.
Great aid and nice explanation.
Thanks,
Jamie Powers
Comment by Jamie — September 15, 2009 @ 12:15 am
I believe this could turn into something much greater than what we see here. Not sure how in the world you figured this out but many thanks for sharing! I will be using this for research with my online marketing efforts with time sensitive information. Great blog and keep up the good work.
Comment by EG Online Marketing — September 15, 2009 @ 3:09 pm
This is “lightning” fast ! I strongly support EG Online Marketing here regarding his comment. Also, why do I get the strange feeling that this will have some kind of weird impact on advertising stratecy. Imagen all “old” postings will not be read anymore.Why should you?
Would it be possible to write some kind of small script wich does the job on the fly? I think of something like a pull down menu from the google searchbar itself?
Unfortunally I’m not a programmer,
Great job an nest regards
Ed
Comment by Ed Burke — September 15, 2009 @ 9:21 pm
Ran, now I would really consider searching real time on google rather than twitter for any breaking news.
Regards.
Comment by aery — September 16, 2009 @ 2:46 pm
Man, you are so cool, thanks a lot that will help me
Comment by Anton — September 19, 2009 @ 3:07 am
Cool!
Comment by Afriend of a person who knows :) — September 24, 2009 @ 1:34 pm
I am using http://www.googlerealtime.com/. It works with Google CSE and works great for recent news and articles.
Comment by jacky — October 28, 2009 @ 12:28 pm