Google About To Give You A Feature That Makes It Way Easier To Search Specific Content By Dates

You can soon easily limit your Google search results to specific dates, according to Danny Sullivan of Google Search Liason . This can be done with the help of two new commands (which are being tested currently), “before: and after:”

Until now, this kind of search was only possible through the date search tool. But now, these two commands will take over and make things easier, as they will be included in the search query itself. As the name suggests, “before:” will display results before a given date and “after:” will show the ones after the specified date. You can either use before:, after: or both commands in a single query to find in-between results.

For many searches, surfacing fresh information often ensures the best relevancy. However, sometimes people want to find older yet also relevant information. Our tools have long made this possible. Now we’re testing new before: and after: commands to make this even easier….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 9, 2019

You will need to provide a year at least. To be more specific, you can also provide year-month-day (in the same order). Google posted some screenshots along with its announcement to make people understand how these commands will work.

Since 2009, Google’s offered the ability to filter results by date. Using the Tools menu, users can restrict results to the past hour, 24 hours, week, month, year and on desktop, a custom date range. Our new commands in testing allow this filtering right within the search box…. pic.twitter.com/UeCPpR1LAM

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 9, 2019

Sullivan also clarified that in case only the year is provided, they will be translated accordingly into full dates. For example, before: 2018 will display results before January 1st, 2018 and after: 2018 will display results after 31st December, 2018. Sullivan also noted that day, month and year (while writing a date) can be separated by either slashes or dashes.

One obstacle that still remains is that most of the time, publication date of the results remain hidden, but that is bound to change soon. The publication date will always be visible for results displayed in the News section of your search.

Since it’s difficult for Google to keep track of the exact date when a document was published, it will display results according to its own estimation, instead of the actual publication date. Regardless, this tool is much easier and efficient to use than existing tool and will surely sit well with the users, once rolled out.