Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Google to bring back old newspapers

Google is redoubling efforts to offer a digital archive of the world’s newspapers. Two years ago, the search giant began indexing the existing digital archives of papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and today, with a post to The Official Google Blog, the company said it’s now working with other publishers to bring a much broader range of old newsprint into the project. “We’re launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives,” the post says. “Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you’ll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed - photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all.”

Partners include the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, the oldest newspaper in North America at 244 years. They don’t include even older papers from across the pond. This newly digitized content is available through the Google News Archive, accessible via the main Google News site. “Stories we’ve scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already-digitized material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators, and are marked ‘Google News Archive,’” the post continues. “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.”

Source: Register

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