Google 200 yrs.Historical News Launch

[Christina]

Internet giant Google Inc. launched a free news archive service enabling Internet users to search for printed articles back to the 1700s. The "news archive search" feature that debuted on the Google News virtual front page generated links to articles on publishers' websites. Archived articles were either free for download or available for purchase from the publishers depending on the outlets and the ages of the stories. Google did not charge for the search service. "Google News now has archive search to help users quickly and easily search for events, people and ideas over different periods of time," the Mountain View, California, company said in a release. "History buffs and curious users alike can explore more than 200 years of historical information to get a glimpse of the emotions and attitudes of the past." News archive searches on events, subjects or people generated results in order of relevance or on timelines. Users were provided options to narrow searches to specific time periods or publications. Google said it was working with sources such as Time magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Newsweek Interactive, LexisNexis, HighBeam Research, Factiva, and Thomson Gale. "Google is working with many prominent information providers to help users discover relevant historical information," the company said. Some of the partners had been pressing Google to offer access to their archives for several years, according to The New York Times. The news archive also includes articles that Google has indexed from the Internet without formal arrangements with their partners, The Wall Street Journal said. Time magazine, it added, will provide free access through Google to its archives dating back to its founding in 1923; The New York Times will offer searches back to 1981, but by next year it hopes to have digitized articles dating back to the 1850s. The Google archive search service launched at the website news.google.com and enabled searching of articles in English as well as Spanish, Italian and some other languages. "Our goal is to include even more global content in our news archive search, and we're working with international partners to make their content available," Google said. "We also plan to introduce the service in other countries as well."