It seems so intentionally "broken", I can only guess it is to prevent scraping? Since searching for generic-ish search terms and sorting by date is a common scraping strategy.
Still, you'd think they'd do a cutoff of e.g. 500 or 1,000 items rather than filter by the past year.
So I can't help but wonder if it's a contractual limitation insisted on by publishers? Since the publishers also don't want all their papers being spidered via Scholar? It feels kind of like a limitation a lawyer came up with.
