Searching for Up-To-Date Help
August 5th, 2007 by
Ana Nelson
When you are searching for help on a programming topic, frequently the answer will come in the form of a blog post. Preferably one with lots of useful feedback in the comments to help you decide if it’s good or bad advice! But, with the speed of software development these days, the answer to your configuration question or what to do if you get a particular error message might be very different today than it was 18 (or even 6) months ago.
A quick way to narrow down search results is to take advantage of the fact that many blogs will incorporate the creation date of a post in the URL, and use google’s inurl syntax in your search. For example, to search for recent posts on session storage in Ruby on Rails, try “inurl:2007 rails session storage”. This isn’t foolproof, you’ll miss out on any resources that don’t use a URL scheme like this, but it will filter out lots of articles from 2005 telling you to empty your tmp/sessions directory on a regular basis. You can even try to include a month parameter, and conveniently “inurl:2007/08″ matches both “2007-08″ and “2007/08″ style URLs.
August 5th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Oh neat! I didn’t know this. Thank you.
August 5th, 2007 at 7:29 am
This is awesome. Thanks, Anna. Google frustrates me with this one along with blogs that don’t value and mention the date of creation and date of update. Some blogs don’t even post those date information which is so crucial.
August 9th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Clever. You could also use the advanced search/hack the URL/create a quicksearch that adds e.g.
as_qdr=m3(first seen in the last three months),as_qdr=y(in the last year) to the query string.October 20th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
This is awesome. Thanks, Anna. Google frustrates me with this one along drshdwith blogs that don’t value and mention the date of creation