Got The Current Time? Your Search Engine Does!

Next month, AT&T is killing its call for current time feature. One reason? There are too many other ways to get the correct time — and search engines are among those resources. Below, a look at how easy search engines make it to get the current time for anywhere in the world.

Typically, a search in the format of “time in [city] or [state] or [country]” returns the current time for the area you searched for at the top of the search results, for most major search engines.

For example, here’s time in paris from Ask.com:

Ask has also just enhanced this feature more, which we covered last week in Ask.com Adds Current Time Feature For Local Searches. Here is an example of a search on paris, which returns a real time clock for the city that continues showing the current time as you watch, rather than a static view at the time you searched:

Over at Yahoo, do the usual thing — enter “time” plus a city, and you get the current time:

Google? Google has this feature, but I spotted that it stopped working recently. Rest assured, Google said its coming back shortly. When it does, you should get results like this:

image from Digital Inspiration

Microsoft Live Search appears not to support a current time command, at the moment.

Postscript: Google Blogoscoped reports that Google has added their time search back again and added some small improvements to how they handle locations and times.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.