Google News RSS ignored our “before:” date filter on 6 of 8 queries — pairing it with “after:” fixed it

Google News has no public API. The Search API was deprecated in 2011 and nothing official replaced it; every “Google News API” you can sign up for today is a reseller wrapping the same thing you can call yourself — four public RSS URLs on news.google.com, no key, no login, no quota form. I re-measured all of it live on 2026-11-11 before publishing this, and one claim from our own earlier write-up turned out to be wrong, so that’s where I’ll start. The gotcha: after: is exact, bare before: is not Both operators work on the search feed. Only one of them is trustworthy on its own. after: was honoured exactly — zero items older than the cutoff, across every query I tried: Query Items Items violating the cutoff Oldest item web scraping after:2026-10-01 21 0 2026-10-14 apify…