Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Google News Archives are Back?

Google had a major project to digitize newspapers. The collection, available under the Google News link, was growing quite large and looked to be useful to genealogists. But due to a variety of problems, primarily as reported, with existing newspaper syndicates, Google had discontinued the archive portion of the newspapers. It simply vanished last year. But now, it is reported that the Google News Archive is back.

I have gone onto Google News and with some effort was able to find the archive. The trick is a tiny black downward pointing triangle in the Google News page search box. Clicking on that little triangle brings up an advanced search which if followed will eventually lead you to the archives by selecting the "Date added to Google News" drop-down menu and selecting "in archive." Yes, it is substantially hidden, but there none the less. Once you do a search on anything, the menu items change in the left-hand column of the screen and you can choose to do a search in a specific location or time period or both.

Here is the statement from Google:
News Archive Search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. Users can search for events, people or ideas and see how they have been described over time.

Search results include content from a number of sources, including both partner content digitized by Google through our News Archives Partner Program and online archival materials that we've crawled. Search results can include content that is freely accessible as well as content that requires a fee. You can either browse through the full collection of papers scanned or use Advanced News Search to specify the date range in which you'd like to search the archives.

Using the News Archive Viewer, you can browse through our scanned collection like you would a physical paper, but with a searcheable collection you can find countless articles on topics you care about. Visit our Frequently Asked Questions for more information.

Please note that we're currently not accepting new content to be included in Google News Archive Search. However, if you're a publisher of a current news site we encourage you to submit your site to Google News  for inclusion.
Are they really there or not? It is sort of hard to tell. But this is one more place to search for newspaper content, some of which is free.

5 comments:

  1. I don't think news archive ever went away. I've been using it since they discontinued adding new papers.

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  2. I use them alot at this link
    http://news.google.com/newspapers

    ReplyDelete
  3. The news archive never disappeared, just clearly found links for it. I use this link: http://news.google.com/news/advanced_news_search
    You may have to play around with the format of dates when you fill in a specified date range.

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  4. I think that much of the indexing has disappeared. You can search for terms that are sitting right in front of you (in an old newspaper e.g.) and it won't return the page you're looking at.

    What IS handy is that you can still wander through complete issues of newspapers, much like a microfiche. If you know where (and when) to go, and the source is not behind a paywall, you're off to the races.

    Still no way to directly print the results. I have a large monitor turned sideways to show legal-paper size images and I have to do screen captures and saves to get individual pages. But it's way better than nothing. And there are a large variety of Canadian newspaper sources online, which is a big bonus for me.

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  5. First of all thanks for not forcing a Google Plus account to comment. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

    Second of all why won't Google get off their lazy butts and bring back useful products like this again? They seem stuck on Ad Sense to gather information from us and focus more on mobile phones.

    It seems since the economy crash the internet has been in a funk lately with not much progress other then turning it into another shopping channel you see on TV.

    Remember the craze of the 90s was all about shopping channels and sports which killed the progress of the 80s?

    ReplyDelete