I find the omission in the current engine somewhat frustrating. If you are looking for original references, this timeline was very helpful -- a lot of times, the current search pulls up more modern references that aren't necessarily as useful if you want perspectives from the past. There are ways to search the current archive by date, but they are not terribly intuitive (https://www.thoughtco.com/search-tips-for-google-news-archiv...).
(My memory is that the previous search engine gave better results as well, but unfortunately it's difficult for me to prove whether that's correct one way or another.)
In theory, having a really nice search engine for this news would be rather easy for Google (/any Googler with a few weeks of time and access to this data).
This is essentially what every new employee at Google has to do in the orientation week.