It says "starting at" not "since" nor "oldest". In fact, if you pay attention to punctuation, capitalization, and even spacing, what it says is a sentence:

Search ( Newest first -or- Oldest first ), starting at <date>.

And the searching does indeed start at the date you specify and proceed in the direction that you specify.

There is no date given for when the search should end in no small part because most searches won't finish in one submission anyway so you can just stop clicking "Next" when you have gone far enough. The amount of searching that will be done for a single submission is strictly restricted so that there isn't even much to be gained by cutting off a submission early based on date (even to the point that if the server is heavily loaded, the amount of searching done will be even less -- never more than about 10 seconds spent searching).

There are also more obscure technical reasons why adding an ending date would be problematic. And even beyond those there are the UI problems which go beyond the fact that most people find Super Search to have way too much UI for their taste at any given moment so adding more to the UI is less likely to be a real improvement.

- tye        

In reply to Re: Super Search (sometimes) reverses meaning of Starting Date (English!) by tye
in thread Super Search (sometimes) reverses meaning of Starting Date by igelkott

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