How to limit a search by date

There was a discussion on LIS-UKEIG recently about how to limit a 
search by date. I posted my response to the list but thought it 
might be useful for others as well.

One of the problems with searching for material in a specific date
range is that it's hard for a search engine to know exactly what is 
required. For example, if you add the date limit 'last 3 months' 
that doesn't necessarily mean 'new' pages that have been created in 
the last three months - if a search engine finds a page written 5 
years ago that they've only just included in their database that 
could be included as a 'new' page (depending on engine of course).

There used to be a reasonable number of search engines that allowed 
you to limit by date, but this functionality is become rarer, oddly 
enough. However, there are a few places that you can go:

With Google you could try a resource called 'GooFresh' which attempts
to limit the search to material added to the database today, 
yesterday, last 7 days or the last month. Of course you'll still have 
the problem of winnowing out older material that's only just been 
added, but this should help. Google labs is also running a 
'timeline' experiment which allows you to view content over a time 
period - it's not brilliant, and not exactly what you're after, but 
it's worth mentioning when we're looking at time related searching. 
Another Google specific trick is to run your search, click into the 
address bar and add &as_qdr=d to the end of the URL, then hit enter. 
This will create a new little search box with a drop down time based 
menu.

Exalead at is doing excellent work in this area. If you run a search 
one of the immediate options that you have is to limit to recent 
material, though they take rather a broad view of 'recent'. However, 
in the advanced search function you can add in a search option to 
view content modified after OR before a specific date which may be 
just what you're looking for.

Remember Altavista? Thought that it was dead? Think again. if you go 
to the advanced search function there's actually 2 date options - by 
timeframe (week, two weeks, month, 4 months, 8 months, year) and by 
data range. I've not tried this one, but give it a go, see if it does
what it's supposed to do.

Ask has been doing their very best to wreck their search engine 
recently - and doing a pretty good job of it too I might add - but 
they do have a 'page last modified' advanced search option that you 
could try out. This may well return stuff that's about something that's 
years old but that has been recently changed, but it should help reduce 
the stuff you don't want to see.

Grokker uses the Yahoo and Wikipedia content and has a date slider 
going from 'all' to 'most recent'.

I'd also be inclined to consider other approaches if you want really 
recent material. Obviously there are the usual news sites that you 
could use, but if your subject of interest isn't that newsworthy those 
will be of very limited value. Instead I'd be inclined to use any of 
the blog search engines to see if people are talking about the subject 
that interests you, or perhaps go for Twitter search which I'm finding 
is increasingly useful when it comes to really recent stuff (ie. in the
last hour or so).