Google's search by date is broken

Do a google search for  "google is broken " and use advanced search to limit to the last year - you should (well maybe, perhaps, possibly, who can say?) get 12,900 results. Now change the date range to the past 6 months, and you get... 12,900 results. Last 3 months - same result, and any time - same result again. If you try using GooFresh for the last month for the same phrase you get the follow results (perhaps) - today: 13,600 yesterday: 13,600 last week 13,000 and the last 30 days 12,900.

Let's compare this with the results from a competent search engine, Ask. For the same phrase we get: 4 (last week), 13 (last 2 weeks), 78 (last month) 203 (last 3 months) 272 (last 6 months) 498 (last year) 975 (anytime). Ask also very kindly asks me if I want to narrow my search to 'Google is not working', but I think I've kinda worked that out now, thanks all the same.

Whisper it quietly, but I kinda think that Google needs to spend a bit of time fixing itself. What's more, this isn't a new problem either - I've kinda been aware of it for a while when I've been teaching, so I don't know how long this situation has been going on, but I'll bet money it's not a new phenomenon.

Any chance of a fix Google, or are we all still too busy working on the 'wow' factor? Of course, if you are, here's one for you.. 'Wow! Google is broken'

Comments

[Sheila Webber]

The Google blog search on Blogger wasn't working for a while either - it wasn't giving more than one hit for any search. Seems to be fixed now, though.

Sheila