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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.
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22armadillo+aerospace%22&scoring=t
Fuck I wish Carmack would stop using his Time Machine to get 1957 publicity.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
I hope to god that they edit out the advertising otherwise all us consumers will be frantic with longing for products that are no longer available, what with advertising not being a huge sham and all!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
My thirty-year, $50-billion plan to consolidate the microfiche market may well be in the shitter.
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.
You can already access the archives of The Times online :
http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/
It's quite interesting to read about Marie-Antoinette's execution or Jack the Ripper's crimes, I especially like the writing style :)
I've latterly been thinking about the googlization of everything digital. I've latterly also been thinking about the spread of botnets (Storm, Kraken and the like). This has led me to conclude there is a Google Black Ops department intent on replacing Google's vast server farms with users' own PCs - i.e., Google aims covertly to use our computers as its hardware!
From Google's perspective it makes perfect sense to use idle cycles on Aunt Harriet's aging Dell to serve googlicious applications to an eager populace. Why shouldn't she host your gmail account?
The whole concept can even be justified from an environmental point of view: scaling is naturally proportional to demand and load-spreading is extremely efficient. In the long term, Google won't need any of its own hardware other than expensive corporate buildings equipped with limitless executive toys and a few dumb terminals. Hell, we're beginning to see that already. Everyone benefits.
As for the the spam emanating from botnets, this is a mere smoke-screen (or should I say cloud-screen?) designed to keep us off the scent.
I, for one, salute our new Gotnet overlord.
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.
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.
So... just like the London Gazette has already been digitized. The difference is, the Gazette began publishing in 1665. Sod the moon landings! You can read the front-line reports about the American Revolution.
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?
I can see why this would be harmful to his career. As soon as word got out that, at some point in his past, he actually cared about people, his reputation as a business executive would be ruined. He might never get another six-figure salaried job again.
Or it might finally make people realize that we are all human, and a stupid act at 18 doesn't equate to judgment post 30. Naaahhh...
You must be new here. Welcome to Earth. We're a little strange here, but you will find that some of us can be relaxed and groovy. Enjoy your stay.
P.S. Please take me with you when you leave the planet
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
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.
Bullshit. You get more action at peace rallies. Liberal chicks are easy.
And the post-coital "I voted for George W" reveal is awesome.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
"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