Google To Digitize Millions of Old Newspaper Pages

hhavensteincw writes "On Monday Google detailed new plans to digitize millions of newspaper pages with articles, photographs, and headlines intact so they can be accessed and searched online. 'Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written,' Google said in a blog post. 'It's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.' For example, Google noted the availability of an original article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 about the landing on the moon." When you search the news archive for, e.g., "Chicago fire" or "Rosenberg trial," a significant fraction of the result pages cost money to view.

Re:Should be great for armchair historians...

[houstonbofh]

Have you tried the wayback machine? http://www.archive.org/index.php [archive.org]

I've seen that happen

[Animats]

Guy/girl does something goofy in 70s as a teenager. Gets covered by local news (at that time).

I've seen that already. I looked up an executive, and Google returned a hit from a student newspaper from the 1960s that they'd digitized from microfilm. The story mentioned the guy being a member of the Socialist Workers Alliance.

Re:Google

[alexandreracine]

You must be new here. Here how you should write it up :

I, for one, welcome our new truly great Google overlord.

You are welcome.

The Times are already out there

[frenchbedroom]

You can already access the archives of The Times online :

http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/ [timesonline.co.uk]

It's quite interesting to read about Marie-Antoinette's execution or Jack the Ripper's crimes, I especially like the writing style :)

Re:At last!

[stranger_to_himself]

Google Scholar is also date-searchable for obvious reasons. It wouldn't be too hard to implement this for regular Google going forwards, since it would only have to remember when it indexed everything. I vaguely remember when every web page had a 'last-updated' line at the bottom. You don't see that much anymore, maybe because it made people look bad.

Hardly the first...

[Catmeat]

So... just like the London Gazette [gazettes-online.co.uk] has already been digitized. The difference is, the Gazette began publishing in 1665 [wikipedia.org]. Sod the moon landings! You can read the front-line reports about the American Revolution.

Paperspast

[Anonymous Coward]

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
(already being done in New Zealand for some years thanks to the work of the National Library of New Zealand) papers available back to 1839. With text search too! Cool!

Re:At last!

[Stooshie]

... there's no way to rank normal web searches by any type of date criterion ...

They're working on it [google.com]

Re:I've seen that happen

[cthulu_mt]

Bullshit. You get more action at peace rallies. Liberal chicks are easy.

And the post-coital "I voted for George W" reveal is awesome.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

One word- PROQUEST.com Available at most University libraries around the world and many public libraries. They have done all the work and have historical newspapers of most major publications like NYT, Chicago tribune, ETC going back to first issues in 1800s. The only third party for the Lib of Congress and they actually pay the respective copyright owners for the rights to do this.

American Cars

[tjstork]

"Don't be evil" is just an advertising slogan, like "At Pontiac we build excietement" (bad brakes, crappy handling), "Chevy - Like A Rock" (damned thing won't start), "At Ford, Quality is job 1" (Got their work cut out for them).

Pontiac's handling has gotten a lot better. The GTO was a bit squishy but the new G8 is said to be a worthy challenger to the M5. If that's not good brakes and good handling, then I do not know what is.

Similarly, Ford is now routinely winning various quality rankings in it car offerings... but Ford's problem is that it has too much debt and can't build enough of the cars it is selling all too well while at the same time has a lot of people building big trucks that no one wants.