If you spend as much time looking around the internet for answers to obscure questions as I do, you quickly realize that often times, Google will happily present you with results that are many years old and out of date. This is especially frustrating when you eventually find an answer after spending quite some time searching, only to realize the answer you’re looking for is 5 years old. For more reading on efficient searching check out this post on the 10 tab rule, which has some useful ideas for better searching in general.
There is a trick that will allow you to customize the Google default results. The key to mapping the Google search terms is really just the URL. Google uses search parameters for querying, so you can do some really cool things. Obviously this is a powerful concept, so a lot of useful searches can be mapped. This idea can be taken further to map keywords to other searches, like YouTube, Google maps, Stack Overflow, etc, or basically any site that provides a search interface.
I have only tested these key/search mappings for Google search results on Google Chrome, so if you use another browser there might be a similar trick, I just haven’t attempted it. Open Chrome settings and navigate to the “Search” section.
This will pull up a dialog box with a list of default search engines. Scroll to the bottom of the list and add the following values to the corresponding fields from the screenshot.
- Search engine – Google recent
- Keyword – >
- URL – http://www.google.com/search?tbs=qdr:y&q=%s
The Keyword is just a “>” symbol, and it can be anything really. I chose the > because it is quick and easy to get to. The rest is pretty self explanatory. After the entry has been added, scroll through the search engines and find the new “Google recent” entry – there is a button that says “Make default” if you hover over the search engine entry. Click that and then click done.
Now when you do a Google search from your search bar it will default to items from the past year.
Bonus
You can extend this trick further to map keys in your Google search bar to do other searches. For example, you can map a key (or word) to search for image results. In the below example, I am using “I” as the keyword.
- Search engine – Google images
- Keyword – i
- URL – https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbm=isch
After adding the above snippet into the search settings you can navigate to the search bar, type in I (followed by a tab) and the term to search for and it will automatically do an image search. The key to making the mapping being a tab completion in the search bar is the q=%s part in the URL.
The last bonus search that has worked for me is the “feeling lucky” search.
- Search engine – Google feelin luck
- Keyword – ~
- URL – http://www.google.com/search?tbs=qdr:y&q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky
That keyword (I used a tilde) can once again be anything, but preferably should be fast to get reach to make searching easier.
One final note
Sometimes you actually do want to search for results that are over a year old. This is true of information that doesn’t really change often. So if you are having trouble finding a website you think should be at the top of the search, make sure that the default search result is set to any time. Ideally you would make another key mapping to handle this searching behavior.
