[Web4lib] Google Debuts 200 Year News Archive Search

[Schlosser, Melanie Brynn]

I found the same thing.  I was excited to be able to search on 
historical events and read about them as they were perceived at the 
time. When I did a search, however, (on the Johnstown flood - don't ask 
me why, it just came to mind) I found that the only freely available 
articles were ones published in the last few years. Since no one writes 
about the flood much anymore, I didn't end up with any relevant hits. I 
still think it's a great feature if you're seriously researching 
something and are willing to pay for articles. As far as casual 
browsing goes, however, it's a little disappointing.

Melanie Schlosser
Indiana University

Quoting Leslie Johnston <johnston at virginia.edu>:

>
>> Google's new News Archive Search lets you search back over twenty
>> decades worth of historical content, including scads of articles not
>> previously available via the search engine.
>>
>> "The goal of this service is to allow people to search and explore
>> how history unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, Google distinguished
>> engineer, who played a major role in shepherding the new product.
>>
>> Google has partnered with news organizations including Time, The
>> Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Guardian and the
>> Washington Post, and aggregators including Factiva, LexisNexis,
>> Thomson Gale and HighBeam Research, to index the full-text of
>> content going back 200 years.
>>
>> Archived news results can be found in three ways. You can search the
>> news archives directly through a new
>> <http://news.google.com/archivesearch/>News Archive Search page.
>> News archive results are also returned when you search on Google
>> News or do a general Google web search and your query has relevant
>> historical news results.
>>
>> Both free and fee-based content is included in Archive Search, with
>> content from both publishers and aggregators. Search results
>> available for a fee are labeled "pay-per-view" or with a specific
>> price indicated. Google does not host this content; clicking on a
>> link for fee-based content takes you to the content owner or
>> aggregator's web site where you must complete the transaction before
>> gaining access to the content.
>> ...
>
> http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3623345
>
> By far, the lion's share of what I found was for-fee or restricted by
> subscription, not free.
>
>
> ------------
> Leslie Johnston
> Head, Digital Access Services
> University of Virginia Library
> http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/
> http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/das/
> johnston at virginia.edu _______________________________________________
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>