Google has launched a service that will permit Internet users to search through the archives of newspapers, magazines and other publications and uncover material that in some cases dates back more than 200 years. The new feature, Google News Archive Search, will direct users to both paid and free digital content on publishers' websites, but will not directly generate revenue for Google.
"The goal of the service is to allow users to explore history as it unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, a top Google engineer who helped develop the news archive search, Reters reported. "Users can see how viewpoints changed over time for events, for ideas and for people," said Acharya, who also built the Google Scholar service for academic researchers and once was a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Until now, Google's four-year-old news search service has focused primarily on stories posted on the Web during the past 30 days.
Google has not said how many publishers will be taking part in the new service, for which Google has independently indexed material from online databases and will display the results both as part of standard searches and through a new archive search page (news.google.com/archivesearch). However, it announced a number of partners including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale.
Archive Search instantly generates a timeline of stories on a particular subject over the years, allowing surfers to target particular dates, or to observe how coverage of an issue has evolved over time. As examples, Acharya cited the 1969 Apollo moon landing or events with long histories such as the Palestinian conflict. The databases included in the service are part of the "dark Web" because they cannot be "spidered," or indexed, by standard search engines and so have not been accessible through them.
Archival search adds historical and chronological dimensions to Google News, which since it first was launched in 2002, has allowed people to use keywords to search for the latest news from recent weeks in thousands of publications, Reuters said.
Users who are purely interested in historical comparisons can go straight into the new feature at news.google.com/ archivesearch. When Google users search for certain terms on general Google search, historical links may also appear as part of Google's standard search results. Archival news links are clustered around themes and according to date in chronological order as far back as digital news sources exist — decades or even several centuries. Users may choose to search the archives of specific publications. Results are based on relevance, with no favouritism shown to any of Google's partners. It is also taking a hands-off approach to how it may make money from the feature.
For now, Reuters reported, Google has no plans of embeding advertising links alongside archive search results, although sites with historical news may choose to feature advertising or charge subscription fees for access to the relevant items. By simplifying how Web users locate historical news sources, the news archive search feature could also serve to spur media companies to provide richer access to archives, few of which have been digitised or made widely available to date.
Nearly 27 million people visited Yahoo! News in July, according to Nielsen NetRatings, while only 8.9 million went to Google News in the same time period. Google tops all competitors in the general search category, according to NetRatings, which puts Google's July search share at 49.2 per cent, compared to Yahoo!'s 23.8 per cent. The launch of the news archive search extends Google's influence over how the world's information is indexed, searched and accessed.
"It is another sign of Google learning to work with and enlist content owners," said Danny Sullivan, an industry analyst with Search Engine Watch. The news archive service represents "a perfect example of how we can work with content providers to realize their business goals," said Jim Gerber, Google's content partnerships director.
The media industry initially resisted moves by Google to make online news or photos available through their search systems or to tape video broadcasts off the air and scan copyrighted books from some of the world's great libraries. However, over the past year Google has convinced many of the world's biggest media companies that Google's search systems can offer a path to new revenues for content owners.
In contrast to Google's book scanning project, which has led to legal skirmishes with some publishers over copyright issues, some of the partners involved with the new service said they had been pressing Google to offer access to their archives for several years, the New York Times reported.
The arrangement marks Google's latest attempt to demonstrate the value of its search engine to the traditional media, a segment that has sometimes railed against the Mountain View-based company for profiting from the display of content owned by others, the Associated Press (AP) reported. The friction triggered a copyright infringement lawsuit by one major news organisation, Agence France-Presse, which is seeking at least $17.5 million in damages. Google has denied the allegations.
"We have been asking Google and other search engines to spider our content for some time," Patrick Spain, chief executive of HighBeam Research, a digital content library based in Chicago told the Times. Some of HighBeam's 3,300 publications and 40 million documents will be available free, while in other cases users will see just the headline and the first 600 characters of a document. To read the entire item, users must be subscribers to the firm's service, which costs either $20 a month or a $100 annual fee.
In many cases, the entire archive of publications like Time and the Washington Post will be reachable via a Google search. Time's entire database is already freely available and supported by advertising. The magazine made its archive, consisting of 4,300 issues and 300,000 articles dating back to 1923, available free through www.time.com last month. With some publications, including the Times and the Washington Post, searchers will be sent to websites where they will be able to buy individual articles.
