I'm trying to understand how dates are queried in the ArcGIS Server REST API (v10) using the query functionality (`...MapServer/find?searchText=...`). If I search on a string attribute I can get a result and its date field shows the value "6/1/1995". However if I then search by the date field using "6/1/1995" I get 0 results.

Am I supposed to provide my date in a particular format? I tried reversing the date's components' ordering, changing the separator, with/without leading zeros, and even tried the timestamp to no avail. I'm not in control of the service or the data so I don't know if any settings are in place in the source data that make this more difficult. The field's format is reported as `esriFieldTypeDate` with length 36.

http://gis.stackexchange.com/q/72943 suggests I should be seeing the date field reported as a timestamp in the JSON output of my query but in both HTML and JSON it is "6/1/1995".

I saw [this thread on the ArcGIS forum][2] but as using a timestamp didn't help me I assume it's not relevant.

  [1]: http://gis.stackexchange.com/q/72943/2788
  [2]: http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/20426-Did-the-date-format-change-for-Query-REST-Post-JSON-responses-at-ags-10