Searching AskMeFi - Can searches be filtered by date?

January 20, 2025 9:00 AM

I love doing searches of AskMeFi for lots of different things. But I find it tedious to scour through posts looking for the most recent answers. Lots of times the info I am looking for is only relevant if it's fairly recent (within the past 2 years). Unfortunately there seems to be no rhyme or reason to which posts get listed first in a search. It's certainly not the most recent. Is there a way to filter searches by date? Would anyone else find that helpful/useful? Thanks!
posted by pjsky to Feature Requests at 9:00 AM (10 comments total)

When I search AskMe, there's an option to "sort by relevance" and "sort by date". If you're accessing the site via phone or tablet, maybe switch to a PC browser?
posted by fight or flight at 10:01 AM on January 20

fight or flight -- I do most often use a PC browser. Mozilla Firefox exclusively. I have never seen where there's an option to sort. Maybe it's blocked by Firefox? I do tend to use a lot of adblockers and other privacy add-ons.
posted by pjsky at 10:50 AM on January 20

I generally use Google search for this (for example: "search terms" site:ask.metafilter.com) and use Google's date-filtering tools.
posted by Jeanne at 1:21 PM on January 20 [3 favorites]

Seconding Jeanne. A Google search limited to the subsite is far better than the internal site search, and not only for the date filter.
posted by donnagirl at 5:48 PM on January 20

The "sort by date" link shows up OK for me, in Chrome on a PC, in both Modern and Classic themes.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:40 AM on January 21

pjsky, make sure you are logged in.
I just checked on firefox and I only see the sort option when logged in.
posted by calgirl at 11:42 AM on January 21

The sort is there, but it's relatively hidden over on the right-hand side. And you only know whether you're sorted by date or relevance if you can tell that one is bolded...
posted by hydra77 at 11:55 AM on January 21

Who knew!?! Not me. Thank you calgirl, being logged in is the key! Duh. I usually only log in to comment. Now that I know I can sort a search while logged in, I will do so. Thanks to each of you for your suggestions!
posted by pjsky at 12:32 PM on January 21

I think the original design issue was that the mefi search engine was somewhat resource intensive for the mefi servers, but it ran against the live database, and was therefore always up to date. The google site search was limited to the most recent time google had crawled the site, and less customizable. They made the decision to limit the mefi search engine to logged-in users, and default to the google search for all other users.

Introduction of MeFi Search
posted by yuwtze at 2:21 PM on January 21

The sort isn’t visible on mobile, is it? I don’t see it. And I’m logged in.
posted by Vatnesine at 5:51 PM on January 21