In their never ending quest to index all the world’s information, Google’s recently discovered that quite a lot of that info was produced before 1998 or so. Last week, Google Book Search began offering scans of public domain works for free download, and today Google News has introduced Archive Search, with access to news stories going back “more than 200 years,” says Reuters.
It was only about a month ago that Topix bragged about their new 1-year blog and news archive, taunting Google by remarking that “you can’t get this across the street.” Now Google’s gone all the way back to a time before there were streets.
Partnering with such newspaper sites and aggregators as The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time, the New York Times, Lexis-Nexis, and Factiva, the Archive Search serves up newspaper accounts dating back to nigh on colonial times (although the oldest we could find comes from the year 1840), matching search terms to text and keywords. Google’s not getting any advertising revenue out of the deal. In fact, Google says they’re not monetizing the service in any way, nor are they really thinking about it…yet.
Even if Google’s not getting paid, it doesn’t mean you won’t have to shell out some clams to read 100-year-old articles about the Panama Canal. Some of the archived stuff is free. Most if not all of the older stories – “older” appears to be “between 1800 and 1997″ – are available through Google’s partners for their standard fee (Philadelphia Inquirer: $2.95, New York Times: $4.95), sometimes listed right under the pertinent headline (although WaPo only indicates that old items are “Pay-Per-View”).
Not that we’re knocking it, mind you. But if Google and its Archive Search buddies could eventually work out a way for us regular folks to see more of these historical news stories for free by, say, looking at an ad or two, we sure wouldn’t be opposed.
