[taeric]

Is a good way to find things you had seen in the past, but don't recall exact date.

[shadowgovt]

The range filter exists for that.

Sorting by date wouldn't work for that. You'll have a ridiculous number of pages of oldest search results (or newest, depending on sort order).

[anigbrowl]

It depends what you're searching for. And searching within a range yielding lots of unsorted results is often unhelpful too. Of course, you can get around this with the API, but that is a lot of extra work for a student or non-computational researcher if they don't happen to already have those skills.

[shadowgovt]

Within the range, the results are sorted by relevance.

[anigbrowl]

Yes, that's what I'm complaining about. Pagerank's idea of relevance is often not what I need.

[taeric]

But if it is sorted by range, you can start binary searching on events.

I do this quite often with photos.