Searching Bing by date? Possible, but not pretty

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 22, 2013
Updated • Mar 28, 2013
Microsoft
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20

Ken Saunders mentioned his great experience with Bing Support recently here on the site. He pasted an email that he received from Bing Support at the end of his comment that contained a parameter that allowed users to search Bing by date. I do consider search by date to be one of the most useful options in search.I use the option for instance when I troubleshoot something on the computer. A basic search like Internet Explorer crashes may yield results that have been published in 2005 or earlier which more often than not are not helpful at all anymore. Limiting the results to the past week for instance allows me to find out if others are experiencing the same issues.

Google makes the date search filter available under Search tools > Any time in their search engine but Bing up until now never really followed through with it.

You may be surprised that Bing displays a date filter on the search results page, but it is not always added. It seems that Microsoft thought it a good idea to only make it available for select queries, and not all of your queries. According to Bing Support, general queries usually do not show the date filter while very specific queries do.

bing date search screenshot

The question that should come up now is whether there is an option to always search by date on Bing, or if that is not possible. After some testing I can tell you that it is possible, but it is not the easiest thing to do as it requires you to manipulate the url of the search results.

Support told Ken that adding the paramater &tbs=qdr:d to the url on the results listing will display the date filter on that page when it gets reloaded. This worked for me in Google Chrome but not in Firefox. I noticed however that the search results were indeed sorted by date when I added that parameter.

Then I remembered that Google used the same parameter for their date-based queries. The d therefore must stand for days. I ran a couple of tests with other date abbreviations, w for week and m for month for example, and they all returned the results that one would expect.

Here is a list of parameters that you can add to Bing's url to filter the results by date:

  1. &tbs=qdr:s - results of the previous second
  2. &tbs=qdr:n - results of the previous minute
  3. &tbs=qdr:h - results of the previous hour
  4. &tbs=qdr:d - results of the previous day
  5. &tbs=qdr:w -results of the previous week
  6. &tbs=qdr:m - results of the previous month
  7. &tbs=qdr:y - results of the previous year
Pro tip: the very same parameters work on Google as well.

bing date sort

The Any time menu that was displayed in Chrome but not in Firefox only displayed options to filter by day, week or month by the way, which means that you may need to use the parameters anyway if you want to filter by another time interval.

To use the parameters, simply append them to the end of the address (starting with bing.com) and hit return afterwards.

Update: Microsoft just announced that it added a time selector to all Bing search result pages. You can use it to limit the results to a certain time period. Available in the menu are 24 hours, 1 week and 1 month only. If you need to narrow it down further or increase the range of results, use the parameters outlined above to do so.

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Comments

  1. Some Dude said on March 19, 2023 at 11:42 am
    Reply

    Are these articles AI generated?

    Now the duplicates are more obvious.

    1. boris said on March 19, 2023 at 11:48 pm
      Reply

      This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.

  2. Paul(us) said on March 20, 2023 at 1:32 am
    Reply

    Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
    1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
    2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro

    Why oh why?

    1. Clairvaux said on September 6, 2023 at 11:30 am
      Reply

      Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?

  3. John G. said on August 18, 2023 at 4:36 pm
    Reply

    Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.

    Special event by they is a special crap for us.

  4. yanta said on August 18, 2023 at 11:59 pm
    Reply

    If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
    Better brands at better prices elsewhere.

  5. John G. said on August 20, 2023 at 4:22 am
    Reply

    All new articles have zero count comments. :S

  6. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 7:48 am
    Reply

    WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
    It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage

    I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one

  7. St Albans Digital Printing Inc said on September 5, 2023 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.

  8. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 12:47 pm
    Reply

    What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?

    1. GG said on September 6, 2023 at 8:24 am
      Reply

      Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.

      I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.

      And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?

      Nope, just charge the customer twice.

      Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.

  9. d3x said on September 5, 2023 at 7:33 pm
    Reply

    When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?

  10. Scroogled said on September 5, 2023 at 10:47 pm
    Reply

    Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.

  11. ard said on September 7, 2023 at 4:59 pm
    Reply

    For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
    quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
    unquote

    so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.

  12. Andy Prough said on September 7, 2023 at 6:52 pm
    Reply

    >”Now You: what is your theory?”

    That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.

    Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.

  13. TelV said on September 8, 2023 at 12:04 pm
    Reply

    Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.

  14. Anonymous said on September 18, 2023 at 1:23 pm
    Reply

    The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.

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