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Comment by grimgrin | Hacker News Reader

Those who use DDG, do you miss dates in results? Having a date present definitely helps me think about the results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=dcss+branch+order

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dcss+branch+order

This isn't a case where I _know_ I only want 2017 results, and so I do the syntax to filter it down automatically. I want all results, but I want to be aware of the timeline of whatever I'm going to click.

But to take the thought further: I can understand when a date isn't important. Say some documentation for a specific programming related thing. You'll probably learn to use !clojuredocs or something.

What about outside that? Those searches I can't quite describe without thinking, but my example above sort of works nicely because that game in particular has changed a bunch (and will continue to) over time and you do care about the date of a forum post or whatever.

For all I know, the answer is "that's when you use !g".

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The only thing I miss is the "Past Year" option. I find it really important for filtering out programming stuff that's too old. "Past Month" is too short. I can't understand why it's not there. I've sent the suggestion several times.

It's because they get results from so many different sources. Many of those sources just don't keep time records or don't offer it through the API that DuckDuckGo interacts with.

Time records don't have to be scraped from the site or retrieved from APIs (what APIs btw? Isn't it all scraping?). When the search engine crawls a new page, or notices an update to a previously crawled page, as long as you're crawling thoroughly, those dates can be pretty accurate.

DuckDuckGo does not do all scraping itself, I think. This is why there's the issue of "other sources" not providing dates.

DuckDuckGo doesn't just run a web crawler, it aggregates from many sources including Bing and area specific APIs. Not all of these sources supply date information so you'd end up with some results having it and others not.

Information is here: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

Any idea why search engines would allow API access for a competing search engine? Usually APIs come with a caveat that you can't use them to rebuild the same service. Also for ddg's level of traffic, it seems like special deals would need to made, not just a general access key.

Weakening Google's monopoly.

But they have Past Day/Week/Month options.

Custom dates is also extremely useful when you want an reverse date filter, removing recent results.

Pretty much my top reason for going Google any more.

I didn't even realize until now that Google has this and DuckDuckGo doesn't. So, that's a No for me, I guess.

Others here are saying that they need this for researching programming-related things. I just add the version number of the programming language (or whatever technology) I'm working with to the search query, when I find that the search results are outdated.

Let me guess, you do not work with JavaScript .

Maybe just not react-router.

A date is crucial, even for a programming related task. There are probably people who, at this very moment, are looking up Django 1.0 documentation right now and can't get the example to work because their system installs the second to last version.

Yes, this is my top requested feature for DDG. As a web developer, results are very time sensitive. It's more than a nice-to-have feature when you need to discern the validity of the subject matter based on which month it was published.

I've tried the DDG switch twice and not being able to select results from the past year has always been what sent me back to Google. But it looks like they let you scope it to the past month, now, so maybe soon!

Dates definitely matter. I am a lazy searcher, so I may search for "How do I do X in KDE". I don't care about results from 2013 because I'm running a recent version. Having the dates there helps ensure I can remain a lazy searcher.

Maybe I switched before they had the dates show up or I never noticed it. The only times I cared about the dates I tried to use the daterange operator in google searches but it uses some weird format, Julian dates I believe, that just made it too hard to be useful.

I still use !g on ddg but its about 1-2 times a month. As another poster said, I tried it a few years ago and had to quit but I tried it again a year ago and haven't switched back since

I care primarily when what I am searching for is news/political. It is helpful to know the date an article was published prior to clicking.

If that isn't available in DuckDuckGo they should definitely reconsider. I use the date pretty often...though sometimes it seems spoofed.

Yeah DDG is sometimes missing to show the dates.. but as far I Know... We have a filter there to get the most recent results... This is what we need right.... It actually show's you there latest year or months results...

I think the best for me would be relative time, i.e.: 3 days ago, 2 weeks ago, last year etc. or visual representation of the relative age. This form makes it more scannable and easier for brain.

You are correct but I love the DuckDuckGo feature that let me to restrict my results à-la youtube (anytime, last month, week or day) which google lacks in it'S front-end options :)

You can click "Search Tools" and then change the date to whatever you want it to be.

I too would use DDG as my default search engine if they added date range queries. I use that feature too often to not stick to Google right now.

It took me a long time to understand what you were talking about, the first few results on that Google search did not have any dates at all.

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