[Objective] This paper investigates the effectiveness of query-based features and compares the performance of two types of classifiers in a query temporal intent classification task. [Methods] This paper first reviews all query-based features and then classifies those features into three types, according to their temporal relevance, namely, atemporal, implicit temporal and explicit temporal. Then, it tests accuracy of a temporal query intent classification task, using a supervised classifier and a semi-supervised classifier individually, with various combinations of query-based features of different types. [Results] Among all tested query-based features, using explicit temporal features achieves best accuracy, especially for the feature on whether a query contains a year; The performance hardly varies across classifiers; Our best macro average accuracy of 81.14% is higher than that in previous studies with the same experimental setups. [Limitations] Due to accessibility of dataset, our experiments are done on a limited size dataset. Only existing query-based features are studied and no new feature is proposed or tested. [Conclusions] Using highly temporal relevant features can improve accuracy in temporal query intent classification task, whereas using slightly temporal relevant features could hardly improve accuracy.