Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Google to challenge newspaper archives


Two announcements from Google over the past day as it celebrates 10 years.

Firstly that it plans to create an online archive of newspaper articles stretching back over 250 years.As the official google blog says

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.


It plans to partner with individual newspaper archives to create this massive database.Will newspapers cooperate?
This could be an interesting one as many currently hide their historical content behind a pay wall.
Their goal is to make billions of articles available for free online.

The project hase already been two years in the making with newsreaders able to serach the archive of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time.
Google will share the cost of digitizing newspaper archives, much as the company does with its book-scanning project.It will obtain permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives.

Newspapers will eniviably see this as a challege to their own search archives and a challenge to the corresponding revenue.

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