Google Debuts 200 Year News Archive Search

From SearchEngineWatch.com:

News and history junkies take heart: Google’s new News Archive Search lets you search back over twenty decades worth of historical content, including scads of articles not previously available via the search engine.

“The goal of this service is to allow people to search and explore how history unfolded,” said Anurag Acharya, Google distinguished engineer, who played a major role in shepherding the new product.

Google has partnered with news organizations including Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post, and aggregators including Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and HighBeam Research, to index the full-text of content going back 200 years.

I’ve looked at the site a bit and it looks neat. I tried to think of something that would have a history, so I searched for “queen of england” (without the quotes). It brought up results from the New York Times that went back to 1854. Unfortunately, to actually view the article, you had to have a “subscription” to the Newspaper Archive. Overall the news archive search seems like a good idea, but I think they’ll have a hard time actually getting people to pay.

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