[Web4lib] Google Debuts 200 Year News Archive Search

[Leslie Johnston]

It got even worse as I explored more.  Even materials dating to the 
1850s-1890s were restricted by subscription or pay-per-view.

I tried a Washington Post article from 1894 from my search results. 
We subscribe to ProQuest Historical Newspapers, including the 
Washington Post. But the links in the Google search results took me 
through something called ProQuest Archiver (I guess this is 
ProQuest's management of newspaper archives for them), which 
redirected me to the Washington Post archive where I was asked to 
pony up $3.95. So I searched ProQuest Historical Newspapers and came 
up with the same article, free to me because it is covered by our subscription.

So, it's an interesting discovery tool, but unrelated to our licensed 
resources and expensive to use if you have to pay for almost 
everything you find.

Leslie

At 03:17 PM 9/6/2006, Schlosser,  Melanie Brynn wrote:
>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decades worth of historical content, including scads of articles not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 _______________________________________________
>>Web4lib mailing list
>>Web4lib at webjunction.org
>>http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>
>
>
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------------
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