Boon to genealogists -- Google Quietly Quadruples Its Newspaper Archives

The official Google News Blog announced today, 3 August 2009, the following:

We've recently updated our index, quadrupling the number of articles included in News Archive Search. We now include articles from several new publications, including the Halifax Gazette, Sydney Morning Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Village Voice. Working with our partners, we've also added new international publications such as the Manila Standard, The Nation from Thailand, and many others.

Looking for a place to start exploring this rich historical index? How about the complete June 2, 1753 edition of the Halifax Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers we've digitized to date. (See photo above).

The implications of this vast collection are staggering. All of this vast collection are indexed and searchable. As you can see above, individual pages can be downloaded for use as source material. This material is in addition to the over 7,000,000 books presently scanned and online in Google Books.

In the past few years, as online collections have grown, it is becoming more and more evident that genealogical research needs to start with a comprehensive online search for existing records and sources.