Yes, I use the filtering tool all the time. As a use case, consider where you're trying to find information about an incident or criminal case, where you can specify your search quite narrowly. But although news reports generally have the publication date extracted (and highlighted) as metadata by Google, There's no way to sort on this. It's a huge pain in the ass from a research perspective, because reports of crimes and arrests usually get far less coverage than reports of sentences or appeals, so the top results tend to more sensational but less informative.