Google makes it way easier to search by date

Image: Chesnot / Getty Images

Looking for a story from last year? Or five years ago? Google just made searching by date much simpler. 

Here’s how it works: Type whatever you’re looking for into Google’s search field on either desktop or mobile, followed by the time frame for results you want to see. For example, if you wanted to read all of Mashable’s articles about Google changes this year, you’d search for “mashable google after:2019-01-01.”

One nice touch is that you can get similar results without entering a month and day. Searching “mashable google after:2018” would give you the same results.

You can set a before and after clause in the same Google search, if you want to see results from a more specific time period. It’ll also accept dashes and slashes for dates.

Prior to this change, Google users had to use a somewhat flimsy drop-down menu on desktop to filter results by specific dates. Mobile users had less useful controls, such as the ability to sort by results from “past 24 hours” and “past week.”

While this is undeniably a welcome change to Google’s search engine, it might not be the easiest thing for casual users to figure out on their own. There might be a more elegant solution this problem in the future, but for now, this will have to work.

Most of Google’s recent changes have occurred outside of the company’s signature search engine. Gmail underwent some major changes over the past couple of months, with the death of the fan-favorite Inbox app and the addition of major features like email AMP pages and email scheduling.

Google even gave most Android and iOS users in the United States the ability to have the Google Assistant AI make phone calls for them.