Chipwrapper now available with time-slices

I can officially announce that the Russell Brand furore is over for the British press.

Well, nearly.

In the last week the national papers only managed to publish 270-odd stories to mention the ex-BBC comedian. At the height of the scandal, between them, they managed to churn out something like 440 articles a week referencing him.

How do I know these figures?

Well, not because I've counted them, that's for sure. Instead I've been using Chipwrapper's new time-slicing feature.

Ever since I launched Chipwrapper as an online search engine for mainstream British newspaper content, I've had requests to allow the results to be ordered chronologically. Sadly, since it is based on Google's Custom Search Engine technology, and they don't offer that as a feature, I've not been able to comply.

However, they recently introduced to their main web search the ability to restrict the sites returned to those published in the previous day, week, month or year. It isn't a feature officially supported by Google Custom Search Engines, but with a bit of URL hacking I've managed to get it to work.

On the Chipwrapper homepage you should now see, next to the search box, a drop-down menu offering you a choice of timeframes. This will allow you to narrow down the scope of your search. It isn't perfect, and isn't yet the holy grail of date-ordered searches, but for now it at least adds the ability to filter older stories out from your newspaper search results.