You’re practicing a little Google-fu to figure something out, and the top few results look like they’re exactly what you’re looking for. The problem: When you get to the page, they’re completely outdated.

To make sure you know when a page was published before you visit the site, just add the following to the end of the URL of your search results:

&as_qdr=y15

So, for example, the following URL searches Google for “linux” and displays date stamps on every result:

http://www.google.com/search?q=linux&as_qdr=y15

When you’re searching for something and the date is important—you probably don’t want to follow an outdated “Linux” guide, for example—you can quickly identify newer web pages. The operator you add to the end of the URL returns web pages indexed by Google over the past 15 years, but very old items will list as January 31, 2001.

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