Late to the party, but Microsoft’s Bing search has finally added time based search filter. Other search engines like Yahoo! and Google already have this feature for some time. You can use this filter to sort the search results by time duration or time period. This is very useful and practical option to have in a search engine. For example, you want to look up for flu virus news in last one week, then you can simply set the filter to show the results of articles and news updated in last 7 days only; older news items will not be shown.
Using the time filter in Bing is very easy. Just visit the Bing website and search for something like you usually do. I am searching for “Flu Virus” as it is in the news lately. When the search results are displayed, you would notice Any Time next to the number of results. Click on this Any Time and select a time filter from the drop down listbox. You can select from Past 24 hours, Past week or Past month.
As expected, this would show the results filtered by the selected time. This feature seems to be working on the desktop computers only. The mobile site for Bing does not show any of the time filter options.
Compared to Google, Bing’s time filter is pretty much limited. Google offers custom date range in addition to filtering results for past one year. But Yahoo!, on the other hand, has exactly same type of time filter as Bing is now offering – it allows you to filter search results by past day, past week and past month.
Although Bing is the last one to offer time filter for the search results, it is a welcome change, specially for the Bing lovers. It allows you to narrow down search results by time. It would be interesting to see if Bing adds more options like custom time range in the time filter in the future.