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 Google announced they’ve expanded their Google News Archive search to now show much more historical newspapers. For instance, when you search for walks on moon and restrict your results to free results from around 1969, you’ll get an article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from March 7, 1969, titled “Astronaut Walks in Space”.

Next to the news pages, Google presents a section they call related articles, as well as ads (“publishers will be able to generate incremental revenue from contextual advertising placed on News archive search pages”, Google says in their help). You can zoom and pan on pages, and a top link reading “Get this newspaper” links to a subscription option from the source site. The interface may remind you of Google Books, Google’s service which scans books.

The service is rather slow at the moment, but what’s nice is that the newspapers are made text-searchable but at the same time are preserved in their original layout – including ads and all. On the other hand, I’m not sure how to see a given paragraph’s plain text to copy it (next to typing it yourself if you want to quote from it). Already, Google had been offering e.g. (paid) New York Times articles, but they were shown in text format. As for the quantity, Google speaks of “millions of pages of news archives” in a partnership with publishers, indicating that over time they will “scan more articles”... and eventually also start to integrate those into their main search results.

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