Good news! Today Google announced support of new search commands – before: and after:! They are currently in beta, but will most likely be fully rolled out soon.
Table of Contents
before:
This search operator returns the results before the date specified by you.
Let’s take recent rel=

Note that the dates are showing not for all results. According to Google, the dates will be shown only if it thinks they are relevant in this particular situation. This behavior might change though.
By the way, here’s a recent Google post on how to provide the date of your content to Google.
after:
The after: search command returns the documents after a certain date you specify in the search bar:

Note that both examples above list a post from March 21st (I highlighted them with a different colour). This means that the before: and
Here’s a comment on this from Danny Sullivan:
before: & after:
This one is really cool: you can get results for a particular date range using both these operators in a single search. For example:

Frankly speaking, these results are not relevant, hope it’ll get better in future. Here are much better results for Avengers: Endgame:

It seems that the carousel also shows results for the specified data period which is good.
Supported date formats
You can use the following combinations:
- year-month-day (e.g. 2017-11-21)
Note 2: You can also use a single digit for month and day:
2012-3-08
2012-03-8
2012-3-8
- only year (e.g. 2018)
In this case, Google counts the date from Jan 1st of the specified year:
Other way to see results for specific time
Just to refresh your memory, there’s an option to see results with more granular time ranges. You can find this option in Tools -> Any time:

Final bricks
The before: &

After 10+ years in SEO, I founded MarketingSyrup Academy where I teach smart SEOs. Over 500+ people have gone through my courses, including SEO Challenge and Tech SEO Pro.
I’m also a creator of the SEO Pro extension with 30K active users worldwide.