I'm looking for a free search engine where you can specify search
dates, specifically the last week and last month. AND sort results by
date.

jude...

According to the extensive analysis on this page from the
Search Engine Watch website (whose sole purpose in life is
to know these things), only two major search sites permit
sorting results by date: MSN Search and Northern Light.
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2155981


MSN Search
http://search.msn.com

To skew the results toward more recently updated pages,
type in your search term(s) and then click on the
'+search builder' link just under the box. That will
open up a dialog box. Then click on 'Results ranking'.
That will open a dialog with three sliders. Now move
the slider on the left, 'Updated recently', to the 
top in order to weight the earlier results toward
being the most recent. This will add a modifier,
{frsh=100} at the end of your query, which you could
also do manually. To remove weighting toward more
recent results, you can set {frsh=0}. This and other
search tips can be found on their help page:
http://search.msn.com/docs/help.aspx?FORM=HLDD4

MSN doesn't show the dates of the results - only the
dates of some of the cached pages.


Northern Light
http://www.northernlight.com/

Northern Light focuses on serving the business community,
so your search options are limited to the following:

Journals
Business Web?
Latest News
Business News Archive
White Papers

Once you've made your search, you simply click on the link
at the upper right of the results to 'Sort by Date'. The
Northern Light results also show the date for each result.

Since it doesn't search the web at large, the utility of
this search engine may not satisfy all your interests.


Ask, AltaVista, Google, and HotBot, also allow you to set
a date range in their advanced settings:

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com/web/adv

Ask
http://www.ask.com/webadvanced?o=0&l=dir&q=halloween

Google
://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com/adv.php

Since HotBot offer you the option to search MSN, Ask, and
Google from it's site, this may be a handy focal page for you.


It will be nice when all search sites include features like
dated results and the ability to sort results by date.

sublime1-ga


Additional information may be found from an exploration of
the links resulting from the Google searches outlined below.

Searches done, via Google:

"search results" "sort by date"
://www.google.com/search?q=%22search+results%22+%22sort+by+date%22

Thank you!