Here's a separate issue I ran into the other day that almost made it impossible to find something Google had indexed. Type in "mumbai comes to norway," and you get a page and a half of results, with the date on almost all of them being 2011. Now give it a time range between 1900 and today (IE, all results with a time stamp should be included). All of the results disappear except for one.
For whatever reason any effort to use the time range can remove _many_ search results that Google knows are from that time range and that should be included. That can make it almost impossible to find old articles, particularly since Google pushes new less relevant hits if you don't restrict the time range.
The only way I was able to find this article the first time was by searching through social media, which sometimes has less crazy search algorithms.
See this Twitter thread I shared (I work for Google Search) on our before/after commands we added to make it easier to do this type of searching. It also explains why it is sometimes difficult for us to determine the date of a document: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272
I don't think this has to do with the issue I mentioned. Google has gives a date for these articles when you do a regular search. As I mentioned, these are mostly around 2011. Again, these dates are coming from Google, not the site. If I do a time range that includes 2011 in it, even a time range that includes the entire existence of the internet (1900 to 2022), all of the sites except one disappear. It's not a matter of Google getting a date wrong, it's a matter of Google not displaying hits that it should be displaying per the data in its own system.
For whatever reason any effort to use the time range can remove _many_ search results that Google knows are from that time range and that should be included. That can make it almost impossible to find old articles, particularly since Google pushes new less relevant hits if you don't restrict the time range.
The only way I was able to find this article the first time was by searching through social media, which sometimes has less crazy search algorithms.