Google Unveils News Archive Search; Video On the Anvil
Google has introduced Google News Archive Search, which aims to make searchable thousands of newspapers, magazines and publications. Some of the material dates back to the 1800s, the company says…
Google has expanded its Google News service by adding an archive of articles spanning more than 200 years allowing users to look up articles from publications that date back to the18th century. "The goal is to help users explore history as it unfolded,'' said Anurag Acharya, an engineer at Google who worked on the archive project.
The archive can be found by typing news. google.com/archivesearch or through a link on news.google.com, will also include snippets of news articles and other documents from research companies that require paid subscriptions like LexisNexis, Factiva and HighBeam Research.
To retrieve an entire document from any paid service, a person will have to pay a fee. "We'll see increased traffic from Google tomorrow,'' predicted Patrick Spain, chief executive officer of HighBeam Research. HighBeam charges USD 19.95 a month to view the full text of approximately 35 million documents from more than 3,000 sources, plus other services.
In a move similar to its Google Book Search, the historical archive will allow users to read extracts from a subscription site's articles offering interested readers the chance to click on to that site and purchase the full article if they wish.
This move is instigating a lot of fear and criticism among traditional companies. In February, the World Association of Newspapers said it was considering legal action against Google News. It argued that the global aggregation service, which displays news headlines and a snippet of text on Google's own site, was "building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content".
Jim Gerber, Google's content partnerships director, argued that the extension did not pose a threat to news companies. "The gut instinct may seem like it is positioned as competitive to aggregators but, as you can see, we have aggregator partners on board. At the end of the day, this points traffic back to partners and that can be very valuable," he said.
Articles in the archive will be available in multiple languages. However, Jim Gerber, the director of content partnerships at the Mountain View company, said Google has not yet made agreements with foreign news providers to include their digital archives.
Google is also not including blogs, because of the dramatic differences in quality that characterise work in the blogosphere. "Our goal is to focus on history, and history has largely been recorded by traditional news services,'' Acharya said.
Acharya also said that Google might decide to include advertising in the archive in the future.
