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Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time
September 8, 2008
For more than 200 years, matters of local and national significance have been conveyed in newsprint -- from revolutions and politics to fashion to local weather or high school football scores. Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.
The problem is that most of these newspapers are not available online. We want to change that.
Today, 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. Let's say you want to learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for [Americans walk on moon] on Google News Archive Search, and you'll be able to find and read an
original article
from a 1969 edition of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
.
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.
This effort expands on the contributions of others who've already begun digitizing historical newspapers. In 2006,
we started working
with publications like the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
to index existing digital archives and make them searchable via the Google News Archive. Now, this effort will enable us to help you find an even greater range of material from newspapers large and small, in conjunction with partners such as ProQuest and Heritage, who've joined in this initiative. One of our partners, the
Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph
, is actually the oldest newspaper in North America—history buffs, take note: it has been publishing continuously for more than 244 years.
You’ll be able to explore this historical treasure trove by searching the
Google News Archive
or by using the timeline feature after searching
Google News
. Not every search will trigger this new content, but you can start by trying queries like [Nixon space shuttle] or [Titanic located]. 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." 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.
This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we'll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable, and accessible online.
Posted by Punit Soni, Product Manager
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