Google has begun scanning of microfilm from some newspapers historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers own websites, the company said during a press meet.
The newspaper search is not new, there was an option to search from the newspaper archives in the Google News site. This new service is an extension to that option where a separate website is dedicated for exclusively searching the newspaper archives, even the ones printed decades ago.
The newspapers and magazines include The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time.
Marissa Mayer of Google demonstrated the new Google News Archive Search at TechCrunch50. She explained:
This is built on scanning technology we built for Google Books, but with some new features. We?ve already started this with books and maps, now we will do it with newspapers. Viewers will see it in their original context, can pan around and search. We will widen the user base and readership of news archives. We already have News Archive search. You will see an interface similar to Google Books search. But our engineers have built in new algorithms to figure out [things like] what is a headline. As I mouse over the page, headlines are highlighted in blue, indicatingtheir clickability. When you click on something, it centers the story, and zooms in. You can do a snapback to the original article. In the sidebar, in addition to sponsored links we have related articles you can click on.
On the web: Google Newspaper Search
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