Any way to get historical Google organic search results?

[vaniaul]

Hello Everyone,

Is there any possibility to conduct 'Google organic search' dating back to the month of August 2016 for certain keyphrases on Google.co.uk or Google.co.in.

I understand that it will be a challenge.

Therefore, it will be really helpful if someone can point me to the official Google statement or document which states that 'Google organic search' does not provide historic results but results for current date/time only.

Your valuable time and knowledge will be highly appreciated.

Many thanks!

[Robert Charlton]

vaniaul, forgive me that I'm not aware of anything authoritative or "official" on this, but I don't believe that historical results are available to the public, particularly not with personalization.

Some years back, Google made available, for a day or so, results for a specific date something like ten years earlier, just to show how things had changed. I suspect that it took a major effort for Google to do this... and that it's not something that Google could do "on demand", particularly not for any date range.

I'm really not sure it would be very useful information in any case. Not only the datasets, but also the algorithms are changing constantly.

It's has been observed by members here that during some updates, Google appears to be alternately testing with an old dataset as well as with a current dataset. Additionally, from descriptions of how Google quality testing works, raters are said to be comparing one set of results with another. Probably Google switches between data centers to get these comparison results, but they're carefully controlling the number of variables when they do. I think to do what you want, they'd need an infinite number of data centers.

Beyond that, "rankings" themselves are really an old-fashioned way of looking at what's returned... as with personalization there's no one set of conditions that affects the order of what's returned for a given query. But even from day one, search position data has never been as useful as actually looking at the sites above and below and getting a sense of why they rank for a given query.

Btw, I'd be extremely cautious of any third party software that claims to be delivering historical Google data or rankings that's very meaningful.

[KaseyM]

Not to my knowledge.

SEMrush goes back a bit to see how far you've fallen/rised.

[robzilla]

This is probably not what you're after, but you can use the "Tools" section of the SERPs to select a particular period to filter by. You can go back as far as there are dated documents. Obviously this will only affect the pages included in the results, you won't be tapping into an old algorithm, but it's not entirely clear from your post what you're looking for exactly.

[vaniaul]

@Robert Charlton: Many thanks for your thorough response, very helpful, big thank you to you :)

@KaseyM: Thanks for mentioning SEMrush, but I would not rely on third party tools.

@robzilla: Tried the option under "Tools" already. It displays search results that were updated during the specified time period. But it is good that you mentioned it which shows the specified tool is the only one existing for filtering results via date, but that wouldn't address my purpose. Thanks anyways!