Google To Digitize Millions of Old Newspaper Pages 201
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.
Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, all those guys/girls who streaked during Woodstock are going to repent (more).
But seriously...
1. Guy/girl does something goofy in 70s as a teenager.
2. Gets covered by local news (at that time).
3. Google digitises that news.
4. Now CEO (then guy/girl) is suddenly let go.
Who hasn't done something goofy and thought in retrospect wished they hadn't done it (not necessarily something criminal). Google might make their "second chance" disappear.
ps. Carly F. might have seen this coming ;-)
Re:Great! (Score:1, Insightful)
Let them. They are nearly old enough to retire (and a CEO is hardly going to be poor when let go). Yes, it is unfair, but within a couple generations people aren't going to have the same problem with youthful indiscretions - they aren't going to have the same hangups - because it will be impossible for society to function when nearly everyone has several embarrassing moments up on Google, Youtube, etc.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Who hasn't done something goofy and thought in retrospect wished they hadn't done it (not necessarily something criminal). Google might make their "second chance" disappear.
Or it might finally make people realize that we are all human, and a stupid act at 18 doesn't equate to judgment post 30. Naaahhh...
Re:At last, something GOOD, from Google! (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually history revisionists will not be affected by this at all. Remember many, if not most, of the "news" in the newspapers are (and have been) editorialized by various degrees. To make it worse, if you go back long enough you hit times where communication was so difficult between different countries that the news was basically "We heard that he heard that she heard that this is true".
Gather enough newspapers from all around the country and pretty much anything you find will be almost as reliable as finding something written by a random blogger on the web.
Re:I've seen that happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Oh no! Exec dabbled with left wing ideology in youth! By the way I was a member of the Socialist Worker Student Society when I was a student because I was trying to impress a girl. Why would anybody care?
The people that freak me out are Young Conservatives. Those guys are creepy.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Or it might finally make people realize that we are all human, and a stupid act at 18 doesn't equate to judgment post 30. Naaahhh..."
The truth is people are immature, we live short lives and don't get to reflect much on anything because most people are making a living. I forget which author commented upon the stupidity of the working classes due to lack of time, anyone know?
The problems stem for ignorance and false behaving based on false understanding, we let people have their animal prejudices not based on anything, other then personal distaste. I think that has to change in the future personally.
Re:I've seen that happen (Score:3, Insightful)
> By the way I was a member of the Socialist Worker Student Society when I was a student because I was trying to impress a girl. Why would anybody care?
A new right-wing McCarthy gov might prevent you from working in Schools, Universities and government jobs, you might even be barred from Hollywood.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Better than the current system where every old story is a scandal. A corollary would be the production of artificial sugars. The first one out was relatively safe (cancerous, but less so than all subsequent sugars), but it was the only one that got media attention, so people started using the even worse sugars. Because the FDA's information was less easily available to the public, people were more susceptible to media hype against a good product. Ideally, news archives would be a step against this sort of hype.
Google kills the library star... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:At last, something GOOD, from Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gather enough newspapers from all around the country and pretty much anything you find will be almost as reliable as finding something written by a random blogger on the web.
I find this comparison a little shaky. Major newspapers have long used professional (paid) journalists who are overseen by professional (paid) editors - both with reputations to protect. I don't see this type of control from a random blogger.
Re:At last, something GOOD, from Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
News agencies. (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you know anybody who works in the news media? I do, several guys both in TV and paper news who have been placed all over the spectrum from editing room floors to the administrative level and even teaching positions at media and public relations colleges. They ALL report (privately) that the whole game is a giant crock of malarkey. The most interesting aspect is when the news teams don't even realize they're doing it, but simply re-broadcast biases and falsehoods because they are part of a form of non-deliberate groupthink. But it's worst when suggested stories are simply struck from the record because they don't match up with whatever political beliefs the owner happens to hold.
One of the big problems is the AP Newswire, to which so many large journals subscribe and pull feeds from word for word. --One thin little bottleneck through which major breaking news passes, meaning entire nations uniformly learn about events which are filtered by only a very small number of people.
The intriguing thing about bloggers is that they don't do this; they represent a broad and varied non-uniform message. This does not mean all bloggers are accurate or that there isn't the internet 'echo chamber' effect going on, but it does mean that there is actually a higher probability of actual news coming through the system. Have you ever clicked into democracynow.com? Some of the more prolific blogger sites have their own journalists covering stories and you generally get broader coverage, and people being interviewed in a non-soundbite kind of way.
-FL
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
"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).
Don't BE evil is a lot different than don't DO evil. They have certainly done evil; look at China, look at their doubleclick purchase, look at that Chrome snafu last week that they quickly rectified (kudos to them for that). Evil can be done mistakenly. And they're a corporation, beholden to no one but their stickholders.
That said, this certainly is Good,. I'm hopeful that their archives will go back to the 1870s, because I may be able to find out what my name is/was.
My late uncle did geneological research, and could not find out anything earlier than his own grandfather (although he found a wealth of information on his mother). My great grandfather, Harry McGrew, wasn't born McGrew. His parents died is a train wreck some time in the 1870s when he was a small child and he was raised by a man named McGrew in Indiana. Indiana law forbits release of adoption records, even that old.
When I first got on the internet I searched for train wrecks in the 1970s but found little to nothing. I haven't really looked since then. But if these archives go back that far, there should be newspaper accounts of train wrecks during that decade.
At any rate, this should be an incredibly valuable resource for a whole lot of people. I salute and thank the people at Google for this.
Historically, history has been written by the victors of conflicts. Recently (the last few hundred years) history has been written by the newspapers. Interestingly, since the newspapers are owned by the corporations that really rule the world, history has STILL been written by the victors.
For example, judging by newspaper accounts only, the US has only two political parties, when in fact we have five parties on the ballot in enough states to win - were the newspapers honest enough to report on them. We're lucky that the newspapers no longer have a lock on what is percieved as reality, and the "third party" parties' web sites wshould leave records for the future.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Gates started the company. More germaine would be President Bush and Vice President Cheney's drunk driving covictions. I'd say something that could result in people getting killed is a lot more serious than streaking.
That said, I found some of my own writings from the 1970s. I'm glad we didn't have the internet, you think my stuff NOW is weird...
Re:No but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google (Score:2, Insightful)
go pound sand you fuckin moron, its a sig!
read my sig, then determine what (if anything) his sig means. idiot.
Re:At last, something GOOD, from Google! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's inevitable that there will be errors in the process of converting from one format to another. While it's regrettable, it's not really avoidable - microfilm conversions are quality-checked by both the film producer and the recipient (at least in theory), but even the best quality checking will make some mistakes. Similar omissions can occur in the physical papers themselves. A page may have been lost at some point during the binding process, removed by a vandal, etc.
If you read Nicholson Baker's Double Fold (which is an excellent read, but a horribly inaccurate book), you might be inclined to think that we can and should keep all original copies of newspapers in some sort of giant warehouse at minimal cost. The problem with this assessment is that it grossly underestimates the requirements of preservation. If you put old newspapers in a warehouse without temperature and humidity control, you'll get yellowed, brittle paper that will be destroyed the next time it's used. If you wanted to keep them all in a 24/7/365 climate controlled environment, that's a lot of money to spend on something that's going to be used so infrequently.
I empathize with your friend's situation. It sucks when you find that some information you want is not available. However, the libraries that threw out their hardcopies didn't do so because something better came along (not to imply that microfilm is an improvement over original copies), but because it was the only feasible option.