Reliable way to search by date "last seen"?

[futureX]

I'd like to look into what pages are being indexed within a certain time frame on the site, or at least when it was last looked at by googlebot.

I've tried using the built in date search but that returns nothing even though I can see cached pages from site: search that were indexed within that date...

Anyone got any tips on how to do this correctly or if it is even possible.

[tedster]

The only way you can be sure is looking at your own server logs. Google reporting is not dependable for something like that, IMO.

[futureX]

Sorry I don't think I made it clear what I meant. I really meant what pages were added to the google index and when. Rather than the actual crawling but what was added to google as a result.

So for example I want to do a search and see what pages were added or updated in the index within a certain period of time.

[tedster]

Sorry I misunderstood. This is the closest you can come, as far as I know. You can do the site:example.com search, then on the left panel, click on "Search Tools" and you can choose various time ranges.

These results do mot always seems to be reliable to me, but they are pretty good.

[ecmedia]

I agree with Tedster that even the search tools that G has fairly unreliable. For example, a page published yesterday will show up indexed in the latest section but not in the yesterday or last week search. I guess it is best not to agonize over it and just focus on content building.

[futureX]

Thanks for the replies, I was afraid of that, it's pretty much broken. On one of my sites which has been up about 6 months searching for "past year" shows less than 10% of the actual indexed pages and "last month" or less shows nothing.

Just thought it would be a nice tool to find out what's being indexed, I guess that's not going to work.