« Previous post
Next post »

September 5, 2006

Google Archives 200 Years of News

Marshall Kirkpatrick

44 comments »

Google News has broken free from its temporal chains; no longer content to display search results from a measly month of prior news, the service has signed with a number of partners to offer news search extending back into early last century. According to PaidContent’s summary of the NYT coverage, sources include the Wall Street Journal, New York Times (to 1981), Washington Post, Time (full archives to 1923), Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale. Some of the results will require payment to the source for access and there are no Google ads on the results pages. Regular search and timeline display options are available.

The results displayed so far seem limited and timelines are hard. A search for Iran Contra, for example shows results only from 1987 through 1992, thus excluding coverage of the alleged deal between Reagan and Iran in 1980 that unseated Carter from the presidency. It’s only a question of history, though, there’s no need to get political. Almost every result for that search requires payment for access anyway.

The official announcement should come on Wednesday, at which point the archive search option should be available from other pages on Google. For now though you can access it directly at news.google.com/archivesearch.

For another look at archival news search, see our recent coverage of Topix.net, which offers less history but more sources and a more usable timeline.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Google’s archive service is old news

    September 6th, 2006 at 4:36 am

  2. Svizzer Blog

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:56 am

  3. Beta Alfa 2.0 » Google Nyhetsarkiv

    September 6th, 2006 at 8:09 am

  4. AlacraBlog

    September 6th, 2006 at 8:13 am

  5. Google Launches News Archive Search Service « TechAddress

    September 6th, 2006 at 9:50 am

  6. Google News Archive! This is very important « Eoin Purcell’s Blog

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:21 am

  7. Gurus y pensadores » Google no para y lanza el sueño de todo periodista: poder bucear en las hemerotecas

    September 6th, 2006 at 11:49 am

  8. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Google、２００年分のニュースをアーカイブ

    September 6th, 2006 at 1:26 pm

  9. Diogo Azevedo

    September 6th, 2006 at 4:18 pm

  10. deuceweb.net » Google News History

    September 6th, 2006 at 4:45 pm

  11. Digg through history using Google News Archives

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:35 pm

  12. Google Archives 200 Years of News

    September 6th, 2006 at 6:09 pm

  13. Weblogg-ed » Google News Offers Up Newspaper Archive Searches

    September 8th, 2006 at 3:15 am

  14. CenterNetworks

    September 10th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

  15. Google Brother - JakeMalloy - I don’t do this for a living

    September 21st, 2006 at 9:18 am

  16. Executive Edge News > Archive > Google archives 200 years of news

    October 19th, 2006 at 1:45 pm

  17. 小小研究員的學習之路 » [2006/09/07] 網路書籤

    November 9th, 2006 at 6:35 am

  18. Let Our Voices Shine » Blog Archive » Google Brother

    November 20th, 2006 at 7:12 pm

  19. cellular download free phone ringtones

    February 4th, 2008 at 10:32 am

  20. texas holdem italia

    March 8th, 2008 at 11:44 am

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Startups.in/India

    September 6th, 2006 at 12:04 am

    Finally! Atlast an interesting service again from Google.
    This would be really useful to research and generate timelines. The revenue model would still remain “ads”, I guess :)

  2. guoyang

    September 6th, 2006 at 12:08 am

    “ads”, ^_^

  3. Startups.in/India

    September 6th, 2006 at 12:10 am

    Haste makes (space) waste. :)
    I missed reading that they offer access to “paid” content as well. BTW, it’d be nice to see this extended to other languages besides english.

  4. martin

    September 6th, 2006 at 12:51 am

    Nice! That’s a very useful service. Very fascinating how far the search can go back in history.

  5. Jonathan

    September 6th, 2006 at 2:58 am

    This is amazing… Google are actually getting away with charging people “money for old rope”…

    Looks like my article on Newsvine is starting to look more correct than I even dreamed about… (click here to read it)

  6. Eric

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:08 am

    How much coverage did that alleged Reagan/Iran deal get at the time, in 1980? It was my impression that that story didn’t emerge until years later, so you wouldn’t expect to find articles about it in 1980. (Although, I was born in 1982, so I don’t exactly have first hand memory of this).

    A more annoying lapse that I found is that the earliest articles about the JFK assassination are dated 2-3 weeks after the event, therefore there’s nothing with the simple headline “JFK Assassinated” or deal with the initial reaction to the event.

    And it gets spottier the further back in time you go. “Gettysburg” turns up all sorts of articles from the 19th century but none describing the battle that took place there.

    Still, this is a fantastic service, it’s fascinating to search through history like this. Hopefully they’ll be adding to the archive as time goes on; I’d love a more complete record of 19th century newspapers (and even earlier, if they kind find them) since all that stuff is out of copyright anyway.

  7. Holger

    September 6th, 2006 at 6:15 am

    Great Archive, even for the Professional Journalist.

    http://www.shop-worlds.com - Shopping Mall

  8. Tina Fontain

    September 6th, 2006 at 6:20 am

    This is pretty cool but you still have to pay for all the access, they dont give you anything for free. I have a Congoo Netpass installed in my browser and it will get you free access to many of these articles……My daily good deeed is done!

  9. Terence Pua

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:06 am

    You can search past 1987 on your example…

    http://news.google.com/archive.....hdate=1986

  10. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:11 am

    But the timeline view is constrained.

  11. Terence Pua

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:14 am

    I put up the wrong link…here it is…

    http://news.google.com/archive.....hdate=1986

  12. K1rk

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:19 am

    Nice headline. 1923 isn’t even close to 100 years ago.

  13. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:24 am

    Kirk, see http://news.google.com/archive.....hdate=1812

    Some of the databases go back much further.

  14. NeoTechie

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:58 am

    Wow ! This can only happen in Web 2.0.

  15. Daniel Miller

    September 6th, 2006 at 2:32 pm

    I guess that search for “Iran Contra” would catch some of Gary Sick’s perverted conspiracy theories, at least articles debunking that crap.

    I wonder if a search for “Osam bin Laden” would collect the State Dept’s 1996 warning to Bill Clinton that allowing Osama to move to Afghanistan would “give him an even more dangerous haven” for terrorism?

    Keep the political cheap shots out of what is ordinarily a decently written blog.

  16. Rigo Sandoval Uribe

    September 6th, 2006 at 2:33 pm

    Only 200 years of news? ;)

  17. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    September 6th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

    Gary, I checked - the Bin Laden time line doesn’t start until ‘98!

  18. Doogle

    September 6th, 2006 at 7:10 pm

    Nice ..

  19. Carlo

    September 7th, 2006 at 2:17 am

    Why don’t they just show some ads instead of demanding payment? Could it be because of some copyright issue?

  20. Phillip G

    September 7th, 2006 at 11:15 am

    …wow!!! This is a very interesting tidbit

  21. Frank Bellencula

    September 7th, 2006 at 3:55 pm

    I tried that congoo site and did a search for “Iran Contra”, here’s what I got:

    http://www.congoo.com/web?quer.....ra&s=0

    If you download that netpass toolbar, you can get into the premium articles for free. See how this article has a barrier up before you get that netpass:

    http://www.libraryo.com/refere.....x?num=3342

    Now download that netpass and you can get in…thats pretty cool.

    R

  22. Jason S

    September 7th, 2006 at 9:44 pm

    That’s really interesting….

    Cheers!!
    Jason S
    I Blog at http://jsbi.blogspot.com

  23. Vijay

    September 9th, 2006 at 6:47 am

    Realy great.

  24. william

    September 14th, 2006 at 5:24 pm

    Yes , That’s really interesting…

« Previous post
Next post »