I don't know... Recency sucks when searching for news related stuff. It feels next to impossible to look into the history of news commentary on any given topic.
Google search has a feature to restrict your search to a specific period, such as 'only stuff that showed up in the last year'. I can foresee google semi-intelligently figuring out it's a news search and giving you recent stuff in that case. As long as explicitly selecting a search period completely disables any 'recency' filtering, that seems fine to me.
I also wish it was possible to be very specific with the recency selector. I want to be able to say: I want to search for stuff that showed up in this month 5 years ago, because I know it was news then.
Date range is great, but unfortunately it can fail when for instance old newspaper stories still have recent news in the sidebar. Google will include those recent updates as belonging to the date of the old story.
