Google announced today that it is expanding the historical newspaper articles that are searchable online. In partnership with newspaper publishers, it is scanning their print archives and making it available on Google’s News Archive Search. Google’s Marissa Mayer is going to demo the News Archive onstage later today. She showed me a sneak peak of what makes this special. The articles are scanned, and optical character recognition can distinguish between headlines and text. This is an outgrowth of the technologies Google uses to scan books, but it is more advanced and tuned to newsprint pages.
We love Google’s news archive searcgh because it lets us find newspaper stories from decades ago, and learn new things about the people and companies we cover. Try this one out for “Lord Flathead.” That was For instance, MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson’s handle when he was a teenage War Games hacker.
Update: Marissa Mayer just demoed the new Google News Archive search onstage at TechCrunch50. The news archives will run contextual ads from Google AdSense, which will be split with the newspaper publishers. Google is launching with millions of articles, to which it will add to as time goes one. The service will also try to drive print subscriptions. She explained:
This is built on scanning technology we built for Google Books, but with some new features.
We’ve already started this with books and maps, now we will do it with newspapers. Viewers will see it in their original context, can pan around and search. We will widen the user base and readership of news archives.
We already have News Archive search. You will see an interface similar to Google Books search. But our engineers have built in new algorithms to figure out [things like] what is a headline. As I mouse over the page, headlines are highlighted in blue, indicatingtheir clickability. When you click on something, it centers the story, and zooms in. You can do a snapback to the original article. In the sidebar, in addition to sponsored links we have related articles you can click on.
We work with dozens of newspapers. The archives represent huge value in terms of drawing users to the newspaper website.
Google’s effort to digitize the archive - does it benefit Google or the publisher?
-Dash
http://adecon101.blogspot.com/
Anything from Google sure makes some Buzz… Let’s hope this new feature will turn out great! As for your answer - BOTH!
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“We love Google’s news archive searcgh because…..”
^ search FAIL!
Pointless for me for now… no Newspapers form Dominican Republic…
I can see where that would be fun to browse around on in the future. I’ll have to keep that checked in my bookmarks. It could be very convenient for people doing any sort of research or studying of topics. Especially politcal or science issues.
Jake
NoteScribe: Note Taking Software
A, b, c-ya microfiche
That would be interesting just for a handful of people who are interested in history, and that is a teeny-tiny proportion of the overall population. Where’s the dough in all this? It’s a nice project that I really appreciate (as a history freak), but as a finance guy I don’t see how this adds to Google’s bottom line.
Probably, that’s why GOOG’s shares are down almost 5% today (as of 3:45PM): so much effort into a project that has no foreseeable financial benefit.
Even if it is useful to only a handful of people (in this case history researchers and students), it is still good to see Google doing something not resulting in immediate revenue but actually useful to the mankind. After all, most of the time we see Google only come up with for-profit initiatives, I think they should do something like this from time to time - simply because I don’t think any other company has resources to perform this type of tasks.
In my opinion a project interesting zaslogovue praises…
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thats a hot chick
I’d listen to that presentation not for the information, but just to look at that hottie speak.
-Chris
http://www.chrisd.ca/
Watch out Ancestry.com. Google has been slowly creeping into the ‘heritage’ market… first family tree history.. now this? Maybe my prediction of 3 years ago is coming…
She’s a hot bitch man, i can tell ya
http://www.mybloop.com/God/goo.....ention_jpg
Google’s Latest Invention:
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I certainly value this new tool. I was able to find all sorts of interesting history about my grandfather (who unfortunately died before I was born). I also was able to find articles about myself from my high school days…articles I assumed I’d never see again. Thanks Google!
(FYI, I probably would have paid for the articles about my grandfather…so there’s almost certainly a market for this info.)
What a spectacular rip-off! This is just a meta-search of the NY Times, Newspaperarchive.com, and Ancestry.com, all of which are quite preposterously overpriced.
Looks like they spent about a week and two cents on this one.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I wonder if the Google big-wigs are satisfied with the quality of innovation at their company. They have a huge collection of very intelligent people, which would suggest that they would be churning out amazing inventions at a great rate. However it seems that many of the things they produce are quite pedestrian (if solid), and the really cool game changing stuff gets bought out from small startups.
I’m not really criticizing them here. I don’t think there are any large companies that excel at innovation. But you would think that, if anywhere, Google would be the place where the invention momentum could be maintained.
Excuse me, but how’s this any different from Google News.
I did a search, and I get the same results from news.google.com
I was expecting to see scanned newspapers or something, but results just take me to the same results as if I did a search on news.google.com
Lame
Oh I see, just more archived data, still lame.
Don’t mean to be picky, but there’s a typo - We love Google’s news archive “searcgh”
Another addition to googles power, i dont know why people get so annoyed and irritated when they bring things like this out, personally id prefer to have everything i need in one place
Google needs to get back to INDEXING WEB SITES!!!!
Yahoo is way ahead of them. I can put something on my web site and Yahoo (and even AltaVista) get it indexed quickly, while Google takes months, if ever, to crawl it.