Technology Network

      If you are a Twitter user, you might be aware of the buggy but extremely useful "real time search" that helps you keep tab of events by the second. Ever wondered how it would be if Google offered this option?

      Now, if you perform a Google search, you already get detailed options to customize your search to display results that were quite recent. It was in May that Google enhanced this "time frame limited" search options. However, even with these options, the search was hardly real time - partly because the search option only had the option to display results from Any time, Past year, Past week, Recent results and Past 24 hours. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, even "Past 24 hours" ain't real time in today's era of Twitter and real time updates. So, if there were some of you who were actually looking forward to Google offering real time search results, guess what? Google actually HAS an option to search real-time. It's just that they aren't telling you this.

      Either Google does not like the limelight or this is a bug the chaps didn't figure out! You CAN actually search Google real time (as in really real-time). All you need to do is to change some text in the URL and voila! You have real time search results. The only drawback of this is the fact that the procedure is manual as of now. So, Ran Geva, of the Omgili blog, is the person who is to be credited to find out this hidden option. So, how do you go about performing real-time searches? Here we go!

      Suppose, if you need to search for the iPhone 3G, search for the term as usual and on the results page, select "show options" and then click "Past 24 hours". Then, change the parameter in the address bar manually to customize your search till the last second. To display results for the Past minute, change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s - and that's just about it! There are options for the Past hour as well, as you might have guessed the parameter for this would be qdr:h.




The URL will be something like this:
http://www.google.co.in/search?q=IPHONE%203G&hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enIN291IN304&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:d and all you need to do is to change the last line to the above mentioned parameters! It might not throw any results in case there were no new results either in the past minute or past second. However, you will notice a headline that says "Past second" or "Past minute" which means Google DID search for the query!

      So, there you are! This should keep quite a few of us happy - for the time being!