Google’s Search Liaison explained limitations in Google’s ability to return web pages from a prior date, also noting that date-based advanced search operators are still in beta. He provided one method for doing this but omitted discussing an older, simpler method that almost accomplishes the same thing.
How To Find Articles By Older Published Date
The person asking the question understood how to find articles published from the previous year, month, and twenty four hours. But didn’t know how to find articles published before a specific date.
The post on Bluesky asked:
“Is there a way to search for articles OLDER than a certain date?
I know advanced search can guarantee in the past year, month, 24h, but I want to specifically be able to find articles published BEFORE X historical event happened, and I can’t find a way to filter. Help?”
Search Liaison posted this way to do it which can be difficult to memorize if you’re a busy person:
“We have before: and after: operators that are still in beta. You must provide year-month-day dates or only a year. You can combine both. For example:
[avengers endgame before:2019]
[avengers endgame after:2019-04-01]
[avengers endgame after:2019-03-01 before:2019-03-05]”
Another Way To Do Time-Based Search
In my opinion it’s a lot easier to just use Google’s search tools:
Tools > Any Time > Custom Range
From there you just set whatever time range that you want, nothing to memorize. However, you can’t search before a certain date, you have to set the starting date and ending date you’re searching for.
Caveat About Time-Based Search
Search Liaison shared an interesting insight about how the advanced search operators for time work:
“Just keep in mind it can be difficult for us to know the exact date of a document for a variety of reasons. There’s no standard way that all site owners use to indicate a publishing or republishing date. Some provide no dates at all on web pages. Some might not indicate if an older page is updated.”
Takeaways:
The time-based advanced search operators are still in beta, which means that Google is testing to see how many people find it useful. Google might at some time in the future remove the search operators if it’s not popular or useful.
The other takeaway is that it’s hard for Google to know the exact date that a document is published.
