Or the obverse: I'm interested in searching for an item not including current results. In some search engines (DDG, Google Mobile) you can only specify "last day / week / month / year", not excluding within recent intervals.

Google Web, Books, and Scholar, desktop versions, are better in this regard, as specific intervals can be specified. The problem here is that for the Web, there's a great deal of newer content masquerading as older. The problem appears in print as well, but not quite to the same extent.