Do your Internet research tasks include a lot of date-based searching? I find that date-based searching helps a lot when searching historical (and man do I feel weird saying that about stuff that happened just a couple decades ago) events, companies, people and information. The results you’ll find when searching for something in its contemporary context is very different when you search for it in current web sites. In today’s article I’ll show you four tools — two general, two specialized — for doing date-based search on Google. All of these tools are part of Search Tweaks, and like all Search Tweaks tools they’re free to use and free of ads. We’ll start with Back That Ask Up.

Back That Ask Up
https://searchtweaks.com/back-that-ask-up.html

Yes, Back That Ask Up’s name is a joke on the song. 😂 Back that Ask Up tackles a problem I’ve had regularly: trying to get current events out of the way when I’m researching someone in the news.

For example, say Fred Famousguy is suddenly in the news for saving a dog from a frozen lake. If you try to do a search of Fred while that news story is hot, it’s likely most of what you’re going to find up top will be about his rescue of the dog. Back That Ask Up quickly removes recent days, weeks, months, or years from your Google News search, removing the recent news completely from your search results. It doesn’t work perfectly because dynamic content can mess up the date-based search, but it will remove lots of current content from your results.

For the example of Pets.com, we’d want to take years off our search, so we’ll use the last option. Back That Ask Up allows us to only take 20 years off our news search, so we’ll have to settle for searching 2005 and back for now. Once you enter 20 and click Go, the Google News search result will open in a new tab.

Not going to lie, I’m kind of reeling from that CBS News headline.

Back That Ask Up adjusted our news search so it was searching 2005 and earlier. The reason the first results are from 2000 is because that’s when the company collapsed; there wasn’t a lot of news about it for a while and it was too earlier to look at Pets.com ‘s failure from a history perspective.

Back That Ask Up only goes back 20 years because it was made to quickly remove recent history from Google News searches. If you want to search specific time spans, you want to use TimeCake.

(Please note: If you’re doing celebrity/famous people research and your interest is when they were in the news and not in general time spans, the tools in this article probably won’t do what you want. Instead, try using Wikipedia Seismograph, Attention Junction, or the Gossip Machine portion of MiniGladys.)

TimeCake
https://searchtweaks.com/timecake.html

Sometimes you might want to search a topic over multiple time periods to see how the results differ; Pets.com searched for in 1999 content is going to look very different from Pets.com searched for in 2001 content. TimeCake makes setting up these multiple searches easy by building multiple search URLs. Enter the year you want to start finding content, the ending year, and the number of years you want in each search. In the screenshot above we’re going to search for Pets.com starting in 1997 and going to 2004 with a 3-year interval. This will cause TimeCake to generate 3 Google search URLs: one to search 1997-1999, one to search 2000-2002, and one to search 2003-2004. Click on an URL to open the results in a new tab.

You’ll see that the search results are very different. Here’s the first one:

Pets.com is raising money and Amazon thinks it important to mention that it bought part of Pets.com. (That q4cdn.com result is an example of dynamic content breaking the date search, I think.) Let’s move to the next URL which covers 2000-2002.

In this era, Pets.com has shut down as the tech bubble explodes everywhere. Finally, let’s look at the 2002-2004 result:

In this set of results there’s nothing about Pets.com. Once people stopped talking about the dot-com bubble, Pets.com dropped out of public discussion.

Obviously, not all topics are going to generate such wildly different results over different time periods. But I think the context around most things changes over time, even if it’s only in additional information aggregated about it. Using TimeCake to build date-based searches gives you an easy way to explore topic evolution over time.

The first two tools I’ve showed you are for all kinds of general searches, but the last two are for specific use cases. Let’s look at Obit Magnet and Software VerSearch.

Obit Magnet
https://searchtweaks.com/obit-magnet.html

Obit Magnet is a specialized tool for finding obituaries online. It’s easy to set up a date-based search for an obituary, as you just search for the date of death forward. Obit Magnet adds an extra twist by setting up two sets of searches — one for the date of death plus seven days, and one for the date of death plus fifteen days. This is helpful for finding obituaries with common names and for narrowing down obituary search results in general; for the most part obituaries are only published within a certain period of time after someone’s passing, so it makes sense for your obituary searches to be date-based.

In the screenshot above we’ve set up a search to look for obituaries of Louisa May Alcott. Obit Magnet creates search URLs for several resources, including Google Books, Newspapers.com, and Chronicling America. Let me show you the search results for the 15-day span:

The first result for the 15-day search is an article in the Boston Evening Transcript called Little Men. It was an editorial/narrative about a little boy who was being read Little Men every night and who discovers that Louisa May Alcott has died. It’s a sentimental article that differs a lot from your standard newspaper obituary, and I’m not sure I would have found it had I not done a date-based, restrictive search. I feel like it would have gotten buried in more results.

Software VerSearch
https://searchtweaks.com/versearch.html

This last tool is somewhat constrained because it uses the endoflife.date API . That API tracks the versions of over 400 software products. Software VerSearch has you choose a software item to create date-bounded Google and Google News searches for specific versions. In the screenshot above we’re looking at version 40 of Google Chrome, which was available for 42 days in early 2015. Click on the Google News link and you’ll find yourself in some ten-year-old search results. This is a great tool for researching specific software versions or even doing a little troubleshooting.

Honorable Mention: Google/Bing News Query Builder
https://searchtweaks.com/news-query-builder.html

In 2024 Google experimented with not including a News filter on its search result page, which I did not like. It kept me from easily going from Google to Google News search results. So I made a query builder for Google News (and Bing News since I was doing it anyway.) Enter a query at the top and you’ll get a number of Google News / Bing News searches across several time spans, topped off with an RSS feed for each one.