Google Expands Efforts To Put Newspaper Archives Online; Timeline, Partners Unclear

(PaidContent.org)  This story was written by Staci D. Kramer.

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In the latest chapter of newspapers' love-hate relationship with *Google* News, *Google* is expanding its online archive effort beyond indexing the existing digital archives of the New York Times and Washington Post to publishers without the resources to digitize. Being Google (NSDQ: GOOG), the goal, of course, is to get every issue of every newspaper online in searchable and fully browsable form. Info on the actual partners is scarce right now but the list includes ProQuest and Heritage; papers cited in the announcement on Google's blog calls out the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph.

It's also hard to discern a timeline. For instance, the Bowling Green Daily News posted effusively about its involvement but admitted: "We don't have a clue when they will start digitizing our archives or when they will be available. Google is pretty tight lipped, so someday, we'll probably stumble across our archives online and we'll know it's done."

Google's Punit Soni explains: "Not every search will trigger this new content, but you can start by trying queries like [Nixon space shuttle] or [Titanic located]. Stories we've scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already-digitized material from publications like the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) as well as from archive aggregators, and are marked "Google News Archive." Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we'll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you'll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well."


By Staci D. Kramer