Google Blogoscoped

Wednesday, September 6, 2006

Google News Archive Search

Google launched a News Archive Search site to allow you to explore historical archives. The new service, linked from the Google News homepage, clears up recent speculations about Google’s newly registered domains like “archivesearchgoogle.com”.

For example, searching for “IBM”, one of the top news story is “IBM Technology Aided Holocaust, Author Alleges” by the Washington Post from 2001. (The News Archive results mix paid and non-paid content... this specific article, interestingly enough, was both available for free, and with a pay-per-view option. You can also restrict your search to just the free content via the advanced search options.)

On every result page, you can also click on specific years or decades to the left side. Clicking on “1950-1959" for IBM, you get a free TIME magazine article from June 1957.

Another search option is to click “show timeline” from the News Archive frontpage. This result type is very insightful if you want to get a quick overview on past breaking news for any specific company, country, person and such. Searching for “Germany” I can see Washington Post articles dating back as far as the 1900.

Reto Meier in the forum comments:

It’s a really really useful [service] that lets you view articles on timelines to get a real sense for the flow and context of world news, giving current news articles an instant sense of history.

This will be a boon for schools, researchers, and anyone interested in knowing the how and why of things, in the context of their time.

[Thanks Reto Meier, Manoj Nahar and Didier Durand.]

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