People ask me sometimes for “use cases” for the things I make. It’s not something I think about too much — I need something, I create it — but this morning I found something that I think fits well so I wanted to share.

Google announced yesterday a new local search app for Windows. When I read that announcement my first thought was “Google’s had a local search app before.” But I hadn’t heard about it in years and I knew trying to do a regular Google search in light of this new announcement would be problematic.

So I brought up TimeCake, part of the SearchTweaks set of search tools (all free to use and sans ads, btw.) TimeCake allows you to specify a starting year and ending year, then generates a set of date-bounded Google searches based on your input. So instead of searching all Google’s content at once, you create “slices” based on year and search those individually.

Once I generated all the slices in my time cake, I started going through them. I didn’t find anything in my first slice but the second immediately brought up an announcement of Google Desktop from 2004. That’s what I remembered! Further investigation of the slices indicated that Google Desktop was cancelled around 2011.

When you can’t create a perfect search query for whatever reason, shift your focus to narrowing down your search spaces. Restricting your search by time does that very well.