The CodeFluent Entities Blog

Bing is a cool search engine.

When you’re a software publisher and you want to see how is your product seen and talked about on the web, Bing gives results that are more interesting than Google because the armies of little goblins working for Bing are more clever than the armies of little elves working for Google.

These Bing goblins, well educated and smart as they are, are capable of stripping out all the junk content coming from anywhere around the world, copied by infamous robots machines from outer regions, from bogus sites to bogus sites, from ghost content farm to ghost content farm. This bogus content causes some Google searches to become totally irrelevant, with the good information buried among tons of rubbish, at least for the 10 first returned pages.

So, Bing is better for some searches, but Alas! The manager goblins (the elder one with beards) at Bing have decided for no reason to remove the very useful “Narrow By Date” feature. This feature allows to … well… narrow the search by date. It’s very useful when you’re using a search engine to spot the same result regularly and are only interested by the “last” documents indexed, not the one from year 1966 say… (hmmm… I wonder whether those  goblins were active at that date…).

Google has that available, up and ready, in the lower left region of the result page, in the Tools section (although I admit it’s not shown by default). Behind the covers, this Google ’Narrow By Date’ feature works by using the TBS query string parameter (ok, and for the non-geek readers, cool down, the following should remain in the field of all possibilities).

This is all explained here in details: How to trick Google into Giving you Realtime Search

The good news is Bing also supports this hidden TBS parameter as well! So the trick is easy: just add it manually to the query string and … tadaaaaaa:

Before:

After (with the TBS query string parameter added, and the return button pressed):

Once the “Narrow By Date” section has appeared it will stay there as long as you continue narrowing by date.

Happy Bing-ing!