My Digital Life explains how:
Google uses a tbs=qdr: code parameter in the URL (link location) to filter the returned search results, where qdr may means “query data range” or “query date range”. qdr switch accepts various parameters to indicate the date range which it will filter the results to. for example, “qdr:d” will search for results crawled by Google within the past 24 hours.
Refer to the post for more information, including examples.
Here's my example of a search for all mentions of Huntsville in this blog within the past two months:
Incidentally, I was unable to figure out how to do something similar in Bing. I could limit my search for "Huntsville" to a particular domain, but I was unable to figure out how to limit my search to pages that had been recently modified: