Google to offer news archive going back 300 years

[ballz2wallz]

Google to offer news archive going back 300 years

Internet giant Google Inc., is expected to announce that it will offer a free archive service enabling Internet users to search for printed articles back to the 1700s, US newspapers reported.

Called Google News Archive Search, the service will direct users to both paid and free content on publishers' Web sites, but will not generate revenues for Google itself, The New York Times said.

"Were not focusing on monetization yet," Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer who helped develop the service was quoted as saying by the Times on Wednesday. "This is new territory for us."

The company was working with several partners in the new service including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale, the daily said.

Some of the partners had been pressing Google to offer access to their archives for several years, The New York Times added.

The news archive also includes articles that Google has indexed from the Web without formal arrangements with their partners, The Wall Street Journal said.

The service will allow searches for news articles reaching back to the 1700s, said the Journal.

Time magazine, it added, will provide free access through Google to its archives dating back to its founding in 1923; The New York Times will offer searches back to 1981, but by next year it hopes to have digitized articles dating back to the 1850s.

this is gonna change a whole lot, even on this forum

[curlyque221]

Considering microfiche is starting to become less and less popular, and internet use is becoming more popular all the time, the easy access of such news articles is going to be very convenient to the avid computer user.

However, are libraries going to lose funding over it? Will their hard copy articles are microfiche stores become obsolete?

[Publius]

[Ardentfrost]

Originally Posted by curlyque221

Considering microfiche is starting to become less and less popular, and internet use is becoming more popular all the time, the easy access of such news articles is going to be very convenient to the avid computer user.

However, are libraries going to lose funding over it? Will their hard copy articles are microfiche stores become obsolete?

Embracing a new technology often requires leaving the old way. We no longer have a large horse and buggy industry because cars were invented. People in the horse and buggy industry lost their jobs and lost money because of cars being invented, but that certainly doesn't make it a bad thing.

With any innovation, there will be people who can benefit and people who get the short end of the stick. But the big picture is that it's a GOOD thing, despite the bad.

[ballz2wallz]

Originally Posted by curlyque221

However, are libraries going to lose funding over it? Will their hard copy articles are microfiche stores become obsolete?

yeah of course the microfiche stores will be obsolete, since everything is converted to electronic format. they'll probably store everything in the basement. i doubt they'll lose funding, cause electronic records cost money too.

[thomez]

they export digital scans of these things via the web to all over the world where it gives jobs to people who can't even read english, they just have to copy characters they see

pretty cool, really - we can do things like this for a reasonably sized investment because of technological expansion to more and more areas of the globe

[beez]

Now all they need is to outsource the categorization of articles to a company which specializes in that sort of thing