Newspapers face extraordinary challenges these days, as so many people continue to point out. But they have chronicled the history of this country as it unfolded. So this is very cool:
Google News is getting a sense of the past to balance out its relentless focus on the present.
Google Inc. has added the ability to search through more than 200 years of historical newspaper archives alongside the latest contemporary information now available on Google News, the market-leading Web search firm said on Tuesday.
"The goal of the service is to allow users to explore history as it unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, a top Google engineer who helped develop the news archive search.
"Users can see how viewpoints changed over time for events, for ideas and for people," said Acharya, who also built the Google Scholar service for academic researchers and once was a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
This is it.
Comments
I agree. I'm always disappointed when I search a newspaper's or network's website for a past subject and find the record only goes back a paltry 30-60 days. That has been the online version of the bottom of the birdcage, and needlessly so, given all that can be done with digital compression and mega-gig servers these days.
I should mention that most of these old editions linked to charge for access to their archives. But I've discovered that each link has a "related web sites" hot spot below it, so just using that feature is a great aid to research.