Hit Search Limited liverpool 0845 643 9289

Google expands scanning and storing the world’s newspaper archives.

By Andrew Redfern @ 9th September 2008 9:48 am

It’s a project that’s almost frightening in it scale but Google has announced that it has begun to archive the world’s newspaper pages.

Yesterday they released a blog post stating that they’d embarked on this ambitious project. They said “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.”

The article features a link to a significant issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Monday 21st 1969 featuring stories about the lunar landings and the infamous Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick incident. What’s most interesting about the system is the way the system links to the idividual aritcles and search through the text for certain terms. As the archive builds up this will make the job of trawling the archives much easier.

Google began this immense project with a couple of years ago with New York Times and the Washington Post and are now adding content from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph so you can assume more and more publications will follow.

According to the blog “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.”

Would you like to know more about Google’s online content? If so, contact Hit Search, SEO and Google adWords qualified PPC specialists, on 0845 643 9289. Remember, its a big world out there, make sure you become visible.

Other Related Stories That May Be Of Interest: