Searching for Current Information

When you are searching the web or Apple's discussion forums for technical information, it is important to only look for recent posts as older posts will contain information that doesn't apply to the current devices and operating systems. You can limit your searches in Google to the last month or year. You can also limit your searches in Apple's user discussion forums.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: So here's a technique I use all the time but I realize that not everybody may know about it. Whenever you're searching for technical information online you really want to see articles and posts that are recent. In the last month or maybe the last year. But you're not going to get that when you search a typical search engine like Goggle. 
For instance, if I were to search for iPad best charging cases, because I just got a new iPad and I want to have a charging case for it because it's got a little battery in it to give it longer life, the first hit is going to come up as an article from 2013. It's unlikely that that's going to have any useful information for me if I just bought a new iPad. The rest of the results are going to be all over the place. Some are going to be more recent than others. But it would be nice to just see recent articles especially when it's technical stuff. If you're looking for, say, solving a problem having to do with iOS 11 or Mac OS High Sierra or something like that you're going to come up with results that were posted before those operating systems even existed. 
So, if you're using Goggle at the top you're going to have a Tools button. Click that and you'll get Any Time here. Click on Any Time and now you can choose a time. So you can say just show me articles in the past year or the past month and you won't get those older articles there. It is extremely useful with anything technical. As a matter of fact I don't even bother to look at the results until I go and set the time to either the past month or the past year just to make sure I'm looking at new posts and new articles. 
Now you can do kind of the same thing searching Apple Support Communities. If you go to discussions. Apple.com  you can do a search here but you can also click the Search button here and now you go into this better search form that on the left side has a Last Modified of All time which is the default to 30 days or 90 days which is very useful or one year. So when you're looking for, say, having a problem using email on High Sierra or something you're not going to get articles that came out way before High Sierra even existed that aren't going to be much help to you.
So I encourage you to use this tool when searching Apple discussions and also use the Time tool here in Goggle when searching Goggle for technical information.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Searching for Current Information”

Lawrence Stewart

7 years ago

Is there a similar ability for Bing?

Gary Rosenzweig

Lawrence: Yes. I just tried it in Bing and "Any time" appears right at the top of the results, with the ability to change to other ranges.

Cool. Thanks.

Conrad Koke

Thanks, Gary. So simple and yet so useful!

Barb

Thanks Gary - this will be SO helpful!

Comments Closed.

Searching for Current Information

Comments: 5 Responses to “Searching for Current Information”

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