Sometimes you'll want to search Google News because of a current event. You may have seen that a public figure has been arrested, for example, and you want to learn more about that person via news articles.
But if you search a public figure right after they've done something that warrented news coverage, you're likely to find that the search results are overwhelmed with information about the current event. You can avoid that by manually setting a time search, but Google hides Google News' date search settings and digging them out and constantly resetting them is time-consuming and annoying.
Back That Ask Up makes eliminating recent Google News easy. You can choose to eliminate news by the day, month, or year. (Every "month" subtracts 30 days from the date of the most recent search, so it's not entirely precise, but it's close enough if you're just try to avoid recent breathless punditry.) Once you choose how much recent news you want to eliminate, BTAU creates a Google News search URL and opens it in a new window.