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Google To Digitize Millions of Old Newspaper Pages
hhavensteincw writes "On Monday Google detailed new plans to digitize millions of newspaper pages with articles, photographs, and headlines intact so they can be accessed and searched online. 'Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written,' Google said in a blog post. 'It's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.' For example, Google noted the availability of an original article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 about the landing on the moon." When you search the news archive for, e.g., "Chicago fire" or "Rosenberg trial," a significant fraction of the result pages cost money to view.
Now, all those guys/girls who streaked during Woodstock are going to repent (more).
But seriously...
1. Guy/girl does something goofy in 70s as a teenager.
2. Gets covered by local news (at that time).
3. Google digitises that news.
4. Now CEO (then guy/girl) is suddenly let go.
Who hasn't done something goofy and thought in retrospect wished they hadn't done it (not necessarily something criminal). Google might make their "second chance" disappear.
ps. Carly F. might have seen this coming ;-)
Actually history revisionists will not be affected by this at all. Remember many, if not most, of the "news" in the newspapers are (and have been) editorialized by various degrees. To make it worse, if you go back long enough you hit times where communication was so difficult between different countries that the news was basically "We heard that he heard that she heard that this is true".
Gather enough newspapers from all around the country and pretty much anything you find will be almost as reliable as finding something written by a random blogger on the web.
Guy/girl does something goofy in 70s as a teenager. Gets covered by local news (at that time).
I've seen that already. I looked up an executive, and Google returned a hit from a student newspaper from the 1960s that they'd digitized from microfilm. The story mentioned the guy being a member of the Socialist Workers Alliance.
Oh no! Exec dabbled with left wing ideology in youth! By the way I was a member of the Socialist Worker Student Society when I was a student because I was trying to impress a girl. Why would anybody care?
The people that freak me out are Young Conservatives. Those guys are creepy.
and we are all going to regret it. Remember the public library system? Or the archival organizations? A bunch of highly trained people with literally centuries of experience in classifying and cataloging information, preserving the originals and investing heavily in digitization to help with that task and to make them more accessible? Most of their services are free or at a minimal cost, especially for students and researchers. And completely ad-free (at least here in Europe). Sure, their marketing sucks, they do not have the latest Web x.0 gimmicks. The tend to be a bit stuffier, old fashioned and not as flashy as our bubble heroes of the "do no evil" (but don't do anyting good either) kind, but then they on average tend to think in decades and not in quarterly results. Data (even massive amounts of it) is not information and Google is not a research tool. Google will always tweak search results towards higher advertising revenues. It is at best a brute force instrument with a vey low signal to noise ratio. It is a pest because it leads people to believe that keyword search is a solid method for research and it adds to the funding problems for libraries because who needs a library, when you can "google" everything. Google sucks up all it can get and leaves behind a desert without structure, significance or context, Support and use your local (national) library, while you still have it.
Gather enough newspapers from all around the country and pretty much anything you find will be almost as reliable as finding something written by a random blogger on the web.
I find this comparison a little shaky. Major newspapers have long used professional (paid) journalists who are overseen by professional (paid) editors - both with reputations to protect. I don't see this type of control from a random blogger.
This idea you seem to have that paying someone somehow enhances their responsability is so much against every single piece of evidence! Do youalso believe that being elected to a position somehow implies that you are going to do what yuu told your voters you'd do?
Do you know anybody who works in the news media? I do, several guys both in TV and paper news who have been placed all over the spectrum from editing room floors to the administrative level and even teaching positions at media and public relations colleges. They ALL report (privately) that the whole game is a giant crock of malarkey. The most interesting aspect is when the news teams don't even realize they're doing it, but simply re-broadcast biases and falsehoods because they are part of a form of non-deliberate groupthink. But it's worst when suggested stories are simply struck from the record because they don't match up with whatever political beliefs the owner happens to hold.
One of the big problems is the AP Newswire, to which so many large journals subscribe and pull feeds from word for word. --One thin little bottleneck through which major breaking news passes, meaning entire nations uniformly learn about events which are filtered by only a very small number of people.
The intriguing thing about bloggers is that they don't do this; they represent a broad and varied non-uniform message. This does not mean all bloggers are accurate or that there isn't the internet 'echo chamber' effect going on, but it does mean that there is actually a higher probability of actual news coming through the system. Have you ever clicked into democracynow.com? Some of the more prolific blogger sites have their own journalists covering stories and you generally get broader coverage, and people being interviewed in a non-soundbite kind of way.
-FL
"Don't be evil" is just an advertising slogan, like "At Pontiac we build excietement" (bad brakes, crappy handling), "Chevy - Like A Rock" (damned thing won't start), "At Ford, Quality is job 1" (Got their work cut out for them).
Don't BE evil is a lot different than don't DO evil. They have certainly done evil; look at China, look at their doubleclick purchase, look at that Chrome snafu last week that they quickly rectified (kudos to them for that). Evil can be done mistakenly. And they're a corporation, beholden to no one but their stickholders.
That said, this certainly is Good,. I'm hopeful that their archives will go back to the 1870s, because I may be able to find out what my name is/was.
My late uncle did geneological research, and could not find out anything earlier than his own grandfather (although he found a wealth of information on his mother). My great grandfather, Harry McGrew, wasn't born McGrew. His parents died is a train wreck some time in the 1870s when he was a small child and he was raised by a man named McGrew in Indiana. Indiana law forbits release of adoption records, even that old.
When I first got on the internet I searched for train wrecks in the 1970s but found little to nothing. I haven't really looked since then. But if these archives go back that far, there should be newspaper accounts of train wrecks during that decade.
At any rate, this should be an incredibly valuable resource for a whole lot of people. I salute and thank the people at Google for this.
Historically, history has been written by the victors of conflicts. Recently (the last few hundred years) history has been written by the newspapers. Interestingly, since the newspapers are owned by the corporations that really rule the world, history has STILL been written by the victors.
For example, judging by newspaper accounts only, the US has only two political parties, when in fact we have five parties on the ballot in enough states to win - were the newspapers honest enough to report on them. We're lucky that the newspapers no longer have a lock on what is percieved as reality, and the "third party" parties' web sites wshould leave records for the future.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest