Search giant Google has taken one further step towards indexing the world's information by scanning newspaper archives and making them searchable on the internet. According to the New York Times, the information is expected to first be available via Google News and eventually Google's main results page and the newspapers' own homepages.The search engine has in recent times been stepping up its efforts to digitise material created before the dawn of the internet - Google Books has been scanning millions of books from publishers and libraries, making the text as easily searchable as that of a website.
The new feature was announced by Google VP of Search Products Marissa Mayer at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, and as part of the presentation Ms Mayer showed pages from the Rome News Tribune, specifically a story covering the American moonwalk - the pages were showed in their original format, thereby including the other headlines, adverts and promotions of the time.
The newspaper-scanning project originally started two years agobetween Google, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Times, but will now roll out to over 100 newspapers, including smaller publications that do not have the resources to embark on the labour-intensive process of scanning thousands of editions.
One of these is the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, North America's oldest newspaper, dating back to 1764. "I believe this could be a turning point for the industry," said Pierre Little, publisher of the newspaper. "This helps us unlock a bit of an asset that had just been sitting within the organisation."
Google will pay for the cost of scanning the archives of any newspaper publisher willing to allow the stories to be shown free on Google's website. Participating publishers will receive an unspecified portion of the revenue generated from Google AdSense adverts displayed next to the stories.
"This is really good for newspapers because we are going to be bringing online an old generation of contributions from journalists, as well as widening the reader base of news archives," said Marissa Mayer.
This enthusiasm is not shared by some newspapers that already view search engines like Google as threats to their own business and their archives as a potential source of revenue, making them unwilling to give Google access to them.
"The concern is that Google, in making all of the past newspaper content available, can greatly commoditize that content, just like news portals have commoditized current news content," said Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, a research company.
Be that as it may, the newspapers that are participating in the Google project say it is attractive.
"We wouldn't be talking about digitization if Google had not entered this arena," said Tim Rozgonyi, Research Editor at The St. Petersburg Times. "We looked into it years back, and it appeared to be exceedingly costly. Getting the digitized content available is a wonderful thing for people of this area," he said. "They'll be able to go to our site or Google's and tap into 100 years of history."
