Danny Sullivan, the Search Liaison at Google Search, confirmed there is a bug with the sort by date feature in the Google Search news tab. Danny said on Twitter "if you're searching with date restriction in news tab, we found a bug we hope to fix soon."
This is a screenshot of this feature:
Here is that tweet:
NOTE: if you’re searching with date restriction in news tab, we found a bug we hope to fix soon. Was really helpful getting reports from people with actual searches to help track that down. Not using quotes in that mode when date restricting seems to help but we’ll get it sorted.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 19, 2021
Here is some examples of it not working:
Yes, pretty sure we've spotted a bug that were working through now. I'll update you when I know more. Again, the examples were really helpful.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 17, 2021
Journalists have been complaining about the Google Search results recently, as we reported previously, and Danny being a former journalist, often responds to these complaints on Twitter. Here is some recent ones:
Are you doing searches from the News tab and trying to sort by date? If so, we have a bug we’re tracking down on that…
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 19, 2021
Danny also reminded journalists of the before and after commands, which I personally love and use often:
We do hope to get before & after out of beta soon, but it does work and should make it super easy to do command line date restriction. I wished for this type of thing when I was a journalist so it was fun and satisfying working with the team that helped make it real…
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 19, 2021
So if you are having issues with sorting the news tab by date, you are not alone. I actually use that feature daily, partially to help make up some holes in the daily newsletter.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: Google said the issue will be resolved December 1st:
We've identified a bug where searching with quotes while using the news tab and sorting by date would return content from across the web, not just news-related content. We're releasing a fix for this tomorrow, so it should be resolved by Dec. 1 or a few days after.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 29, 2021
