Google to Sell Old News Articles

Krishna Dagli was one of a few people to note that Google is planning on selling old news. Or more accurately, scanning in 200 years of old newspapers, and selling people the ability to view the full text. They'll be using publications like the NYT and Time magazine. Summaries will be free, but the full article text will have a price.

Comments

The service is already launched

[ribuck]

TFA is old news. The service is already launched here: http://news.google.com/archivesearch

Web Owls (a group blog by some Google Answers researchers) has a piece about it: http://web-owls.com/2006/09/06/googles-news-archiv e-search/

Re:ploy to promote checkout

[theckhd]

The charge is from the original publisher. FTFA:

What's more, publishers don't have to share the wealth with Google. The search-engine company will receive no payment from publishers' content fees, advertising, or supplying traffic. .... The results initially will be served without Google's customary sponsored links on the right side of the page, and at the outset, Google won't make money directly from the service.

Though the article did quote a Google engineer saying that they may add adwords later on.

Re-copyrighted

[tiltowait]

As I understand it, when a full text content provider republishes copyright-free works, they copyright their newly bundled publication. So I can't, say, go in to ProQuest Historical Newspapers and download everything and host it providing free access. Further reproduction is prohibited. (But how you can prove you took *their* republished text is another issue I suppose.)

It's why a search for "Alice in Wonderland" in Google Books gets you only a few pages, while Project Gutenberg delivers the whole text. The books in Google (for the copyright-free text) are for copyrighted books (or presentations, rather).

A lot of organizations have made money off of reproducing copyright-free materials. You can reprint government documents (US federal ones are usually copyright-free) and re-sell them, for example. The publisher of the 9-11 report (available freely online, not that it was widely advertised as such) got a real "royalty-free windfall" from the bestseller.

Wrong, wrong, wrong: Google to scan nothing

[MoNickels]

Google is not scanning anything. It is merely providing a deep-web metasearch for pre-existing databases such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale. These are, for the most part, pay services that until now had to be searched separately. For people like me (a lexicographer) this is great news because it will shave many minutes off of each work day. Now, if they'd also make them affordable to independent scholars...