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Google To Digitize Millions of Old Newspaper Pages

Posted by kdawson on from the all-the-news-that-fits-we-print dept.

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.

15 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. At last! by telchine · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I welcome this news. For too long, research on the Internet has been a frustrating task. For any events after about 1997, there's oodles of information. However there's a giant hole in the amount of information available for events before then. Google Books went some way towards addressing this, but it was still an intense task because a lot of the time, you still have to find and buy the books (or find them in a Library).

    I really hope they plan to go as far as putting local, regional newspapers online as well.

    1. Re:At last! by Apple+Acolyte · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The thing that bothers me about Google to this day is that there's no way to rank normal web searches by any type of date criterion. If I search keywords looking for pages related to contemporary news with a normal Google search, it's quite probable that among the top hits will be an article from 1997.

      Google News is much more functional in this regard, obviously, but it would be nice if a normal Google search were date sensitive. Yes, I know that that would require proper metadata tagging of the entire Internet if one wanted to implement such a schema in a proper fashion. But since we're dreaming, I dare to dream.

      --
      Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
  2. At last, something GOOD, from Google! by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At last, something that looks really GOOD, from Google! With free access, this will really change the world, even more.

    History revisionists will find it even more difficult to dupe.

    Maybe there are serious drawbacks, but, for the time I cannot see anything but the positive aspects.

    1. Re:At last, something GOOD, from Google! by DerekLyons · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Maybe there are serious drawbacks

      There are serious drawbacks, but mostly they aren't actually Google's fault.
       
      The problem is, this kind of preservation costs serious money - so it's only done once from one master. Then that one master is distributed widely.
       
      An anecdote from the early 90's, when moving newspaper archives onto microfiche really got started in a serious way. A friend was doing research for a college thesis, and the microfiche copy at his university of an obscure and long defunct western paper was missing a page (a page of the newspaper had been lost sometime in the past and thus was not in the microfiche copy) - the precise page he needed in fact. So he called around and got photocopies (real photocopies back then) from other universities whose libraries held microfiche copies of that newspaper.
       
        Each and every one of them was missing the same page.
       
      Turns out one library had paid to have their archives copied onto microfiche - and then recouped their costs by selling copies. Each and every library that had held dead tree copies had replaced them with this microfiche and then heaved the hardcopies into the dumpster.
       
      That page is now forever lost to history.

    2. Re:At last, something GOOD, from Google! by T.E.D. · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Here's a not so funny story along the same vein. Back in 1921 there was a little race war in Tulsa, OK. Being less numerous, the blacks lost and their part of town was burned to the ground. Nobody to this day knows how many died in its defense and the ensuing carnage.

      One of the immediate causes was said to be an article in one of the Tulsa papers. In the ensuing coverup, all copies of that article seem to have disappeared. You can go try to look it up in your local library today if you want. Any copy of the Tulsa World from Tuesday, May 31, 1921 that historians will ever see has an article cut out of it.

  3. Should be great for armchair historians... by Anik315 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I hope they aren't restricting it to just newspapers. I've saved tons of interesting web articles from official news websites that have mysteriously disappeared over the years. They're not even in the Google cache. Hopefully, most of them will be in the Google News archive.

  4. Just buy databases? by TFer_Atvar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why doesn't Google just purchase some of the better newspaper archive databases, such as NewsBank, and simply release all the stories for free? It'd likely be a lot cheaper than duplicating effort, and would help information be released more quickly.

    Incidentally, if you're close to a university or a good library, many of these places already hold subscriptions to such services and offer the use of them for free. I'd love to see Google expand upon this already-good base rather than duplicating effort.

  5. News cartels... by Brain+Damaged+Bogan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder how the news cartels will react to their copyrighted works being copied and put online... they've tried to sue google just for displaying content available on their sites and referenced from their sites with links...

    --
    -- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
  6. Re:Uh-oh! by SeaFox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Funny enough, I checked out the example just to see the advertising on the paper. We all know enough about the moon landing I really don't need to see a 1969 paper of the info. I wanted to see 1) How big the headline is (you notice that you don't see the old 200+pt size headlines on papers now that we used to see for things like wars ending, man on the moon, ect), and 2) Getting a kick out of the old school graphic design and ads in the paper. I was zoomed in reading the movie listing on the opposite page (I guess the back) from the moon-landing story. I didn't see any prices for admission (something to raise my ire at the current $7 "matinee") but I didn't see any evidence they had removed it either.

  7. Re:Awesome by plen246 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now I can find out everyone I knew who's died with Google archiving the obituaries.

    I'm not sure why this was modded "Funny". If Google really is doing regional and local papers, given enough time and effort on Google's part, I may well be able to find stories and obits detailing the lives of relatives and grandparents with whom I never had the opportunity to talk.

    Now, if Facebook gets in on this action, things could get a little bit creepy. I don't look forward to being cyber-stalked by the dead.

  8. Now if only the book police... by blahplusplus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... would allow google to do the same thing. There's been so many times what was interesting came up in a book google searched only to have pages blanked out. Sometimes I wonder if they should just put advertising on the book itself and pay the owners/authors directly (for the hits/adclicks/being read, etc).

  9. Re:Google kills the library star... by MMC+Monster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Libraries will adapt.

    Maybe google will sell pre-filled servers to libraries that contain a terabyte of the news archive and a way to update directly from google.com for a nominal fee.

    Maybe libraries will just use the google archive and save all the expense and space of the microfilm archive and put it to better use.

    --
    Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
  10. Re:Great! by Oktober+Sunset · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Traffic offence are acceptable in our society, being a naked hippy is not.

    --
    What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
  11. Re:I've seen that happen by TRS80NT · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Besides...
    "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." Attrib. various, including Churchill.

    --
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
  12. Re:I've seen that happen by n+dot+l · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, given the number of abstinence-only christian chicks that get pregnant at a very young age, I'd say you have a point.