A short post on the Google News blog today revealed a big number: Google recently quadrupled the number of newspaper articles in its News Archive Search. You may recall that at TechCrunch50 last year, Google’s Marissa Mayer demoed this powerful news tool that can search the text of publications far back in time — some over 200 years old.
The recent update saw Google add a bunch of new publications, including some from different parts of the world. And it even has a newspaper in the archives from 1753 now. The fact that it’s searchable is fairly insane.
Google launched with “millions” of searchable articles, so now we have to assume it has millions times four (Google didn’t give an exact number). But this along with its book scanning efforts are getting impressive in their size and scope (but the book scanning is not without controversy).
Of course, why Google primarily cares about archiving these old publications is not just for information, but also for the fact that it can sell contextual AdSense ads against them. Look at this article from the Manila Standard about a volcano eruption, it features an ad to get an emergency management degree.
[photo: flickr/DRB62]
Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, but the $mart thing to do is to cash googlead$ in our search for knowledge!
The “do no evil” corporation can pimp the internet anyway they want! right?
To slow down Google’s monopoly, you simply don’t it and its services. The thing is be happy to compromise the results of other services.
No, much more than that. We can count on the objective tech-’journalism’ of many googlead fueled blogg$ and site$!
Damn, bro, lay off the $ sign! You’ll break the key!
You can stop but who is going to stop the other millions?
You can always just NOT use Google services.
Your worry is better placed on that rapidly expanding organization that we have NO CHOICE about… the US Government.
Wait, what? Information is knowledge a lot of the time and knowledge is certainly the cornerstone of wisdom. Ads? Ads pay for this kind of service, it’s one thing to knock Google for it’s belief of being better than the competition, it’s another to say “Hey, here’s a genuinely useful and interesting project that is being done for the world community, but why should they meet their costs?” It’s just the same as Ads on Wikipedia!
Okay, You can start here: http://www.tgda...view/43156/141/
Firs one, as always.
Any form of data, available anywhere, anytime.
Crazy!
This is very obviously very awesome. Congrats to Google!
I never want to use microfiche ever again.
yeah – i really just don’t buy into the criticisms of Google for this – this is really great stuff and will help make so much more possible to understand our history and our culture…
Wow that is just insane. But people are right about the whole Google monopoly, i just hope they dont abuse it and keep innovating.
Here is my perspective: Previously this data has been virtually inaccessible to me. Now I can access it from anywhere in the world where I have internet access. This is a great service for me (and I don’t feel bad about Google putting ads up because I wouldn’t have read this information without Google)
THE Feature is crazy.
i like it.
Wow, this is amazing! It goes waaaaaaaay back to 1600. Phew…
Tried going back and it is pretty cool. I do love the contextual advertising against these old newspapers. I really think contextual advertising should focus more on genealogy type searches. It would make much more sense.
Pretty cool to be able to find out about the past through newspapers online.
most content returned in search results is behind a paywall., in many cases at exorbitant prices. what’s the google cut in these transactions?
coming to think of it, the main purpose here for google is to increase the inventory of serviceable queries.
I will support the idea, coz that’s gonna ensure lesser cutting of trees and lesser pulp and even lesser print media. duh.
cheers,
neha
At the end of the day Google provide excellent, free services that just work. You’ll have a hard job convincing the happy users – me included that Google are evil.
I just wanted to link to this article on the news archives
The Tragic Fate of the Titanic (The Sydney Mail) – http://news.goo...&dq=titanic
thrilling descriptions of getting real-time ‘wireless’ messages from the ship as it sank.
Much like Twitter, almost a 100 years later.
Wonder why people aren’t making a bigger fuss about this. Guess revolutions really happens at night.
Seems like Google wants to be a huge online library. You think that they’ll start archiving current newspapers too?
When do you think newspapers will start going on sale via Google?
Does google have a page listing the newspapers available that they have archived?
rather than searching, it would be nice to be able to just browse their newspaper collection and dip in and out on specific dates in history.
According to that Halifax Gazette article, the French were stylin even in the 1700s.
A corporation’s goal is to make money. If you think making money legitimately is evil you don’t know what evil is. And one who thinks that giving universal access to useful information which was previously inaccessible is doing evil is a moron.
A corporation’s goal is to make money. If you think making money legitimately is evil you don’t know what evil is. And one who thinks that giving universal access to useful information which was previously inaccessible is doing evil is a moron.
(Please delete my previous comment: wrong twitter username.)
Like how bout letting you search for a certain newspaper so that you know your getting the archives you want so it won’t be a pain in the butt to search.
Oh wait you can’t criticise Google just like you can’t critisce any prodcuts online. Damn. *axe falls on self*
*mumbles about insensitive fanboys*