Matt Cutts, Google’s web spam guru, wrote a fabulous blog post that included a lot of Google options many people, including me, are not aware of. One of those is the ability to search Google by date. I didn’t know that was an option. Appprently, Google slipped that one in on me.

I think it’s a great idea. But how will it affect search?

Let’s say that you had a sale last summer on ladies shoes and you wrote about it extensively on your blog. A local customer wanted to remember what she paid for her shoes so Googles it. If she queries “shoes” and your store name or name of the town, what will she see? It will be a crapshoot on whether she finds what she is looking for. She could just go to your blog and search there, but what if she doesn’t remember the blog address?

Google’s date search makes it possible for her to look back, however, the way it is structured, the customer has to search by “recent”, “past 24 hours”, “past week”, and “past year”. Not really helpful, is it?

But someone over at ResearchBuzz has the solution: Add a date search form so the searcher can just enter the dates that they want to search for. And what was Matt Cutts’ response? Read what he says here. Better yet, check it out below:

Once you move into searching with date ranges, you can sort Google results by date. This opens up lots of options for power searchers.

OK, so he liked the suggestion but points out that you can order your search results by date, which is cool. And helpful. But how many pages will you have to go back before you find results from a year ago? I performed a search for a less-than-popular term and clicked on to page 23 of the search results pages only to be taken back to 9 hours ago. I like the date form idea. Simple and more control for the user. What do you think?