By If you’ve landed on this page, it’s because you’ve heard about these two new commands (after: & before:) and are wondering about their purposes and how to use them.
These are commands intended for a restricted audience since these commands are not clearly known to the general public.
These options are useful when you need to find an old article when Google tends to push a majority of “fresh” content or on the contrary to have recent information on a subject on which Google has not yet modified the content. SERPs.
The commands therefore allow us to search for a result that has appeared:
- Before a certain date
- After a certain date
- Between two dates
How do they work?
Using these commands is pretty straightforward. We have the possibility to enter only a year, a year and a month, or a complete date.
You will notice that unlike the search options, the operators do not accept textual or “string” values, for example “last week” “last month” or “last year”.
In addition, Google does not (yet?) Differentiate between slashes “/” and dashes “-” and
unnecessary 0s are also ignored. 04 or 4 for April is therefore correct.
All the following variants are therefore valid:
“The Subject before: 2019-4-14”
“The Subject after: 2019/4/15”
“The Subject after: 2019-04-14 before: 2019-04-15”
The “Before: YYYY / MM / JJ “
command This command is therefore used to target the pages / articles which deal with a subject before an event. Quite practical in some cases, when you need to go back slightly
The “after: YYYY / MM / DD ” command
Conversely, we have the possibility of targeting all the indexed pages from a given date:
The two commands combine “befor: YYYY / MM / DD after: YYYY / MM / DD” As
you will have understood, this command allows you to target an event between two dates. Here for example, very practical to have only the articles which came out when the event appeared and not before or after.
For the same query, here are 3 very different results.
