Simferopol, Russia – August 7, 2014: Google biggest Internet search engine. Google.com domain was… [+]
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Life is about to get a bit more difficult for image sleuths.
According to a Reddit thread on /r/google, the search engine has quietly removed a button that allowed users of Google Image Search to quickly find results within a custom time frame. Now, the date filter on Google’s Image search only has buttons that allow users to find images from the past year and newer on the fly.
This is not the first set of filter buttons Google has removed from the image search engine this year: Last month, the company removed the ability for users to filter results by “minimum size,” “exact size,” and “full color.” These feature buttons, however, are still available in “advanced search.” Custom date range is not yet available as a button within advanced search.
Google no longer allows users to input a custom date range when searching for images.
This does not mean Google has blocked or removed the ability for users to look up images within a certain time frame: Users can still manually search for images within a certain time frame by using the proper operators within a normal images search query.
For instance, if you are looking for Peloton images from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2017, you could type in “peloton after:2017-01-01 before:2017-12-31.”
The moves did not go over well with members of /r/google, as it makes it a bit more difficult for average users to look for images within a certain date range, with one Redditor saying, “W
hat kind of dumb idea was this?”
I reached out to Google for comment on this story. I have yet to hear back and will update this article if I do.
Article source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2019/09/26/google-makes-it-more-difficult-to-find-old-images/