UPDATE: I’ve since moved to a better way of doing this. Please read that first/instead.

Sick of clicking on “More tools” and “Past year” after almost all of your Google searches? I was, so I hacked together a dotjs quickie which adds the necessary params if they aren’t already provided.

Disclaimer: this has only been tested on searches performed from the omnibar. I can’t remember the last time I visited google.com.

First, use Chrome as your browser. Next, install dotjs. Finally, drop this snippet into ~/.js/google.com.js:

if (window.location.pathname == "/search") {
  if (!window.location.href.match("&tbs=")) {
    window.location.href += "&tbs=qdr:y&tbo=1";
  }
}

If you prefer your timely searches to be constrained differently, change the tbs param as follows:

Recency is a big deal. One of these days Google will allow this as a setting in our search preferences. Until then, JavaScript FTW!