WebProNews

Yeah... I don't know why any newspaper would want to do this.  Any paper with a large archive only needs to digitize it and put it online.  This will drive a huge amount of traffic to their own websites, and this can be monetized.

Google doesn't create content, but links to others. They offered a Faustian deal to newspapers to digitize their past editions at no charge to them. However, the finished, digital pages reside on Google's servers and do little to drive traffic to the newspapers' websites. It can be argued that the finished digital pages belong to Google and not the news organization since Google did the work of digitizing them. I fear the news organizations have given away their valuable intellectual property.

Newspapers have been late in digitizing their old editions because it is very expensive, especially for those with over a hundred years of publishing behind them. Then throw in the competition from eBay and Craig's List and less revenue due to a poor economy and few newspapers have been able to afford to digitize their past daily pages.

As a user of the Internet I applaud the ability to search in old editions of important newspapers. As a newspaper reader I worry that Google is stealing the intellectual property of those old established newspapers while giving little in return. If the newspapers were to disappear and their newsrooms were no longer operating the news gathering capability of the USA would be greatly reduced. Google would still have the digital copies of their historic editions. For some reason I am reminded of the shadows of the dead burned onto the walls of Hiroshima.

I once saw Ariana Huffington in a panel discussion where she proclaimed that the days of newspapers were numbered. However, most Huffington Post stories appear to begin, "in the NY Times or the Washington Post today". I haven't seen any other form of news gathering which has the integrity or reach of the traditional local newspaper. TV News and Cable News are more entertainment centered and the Internet is simply an aggregate of stories from elsewhere. The demise of newspapers in this country will be a black day indeed.

Google is nothing more then a version 2.0 of the new economy hype some years ago.

After the initial idea (to rank pages / sites against their references in the web) - wich was realized without a lot of money - not one another really new and worthy idea was come out of googles "brain". Google is driving just on his success from the first days.

To hold the "unique" (virtually) first position Google has to eat more and more money each month. Their only hope is to get another such breaking idea like the initial google - but this wont come out just of more money...

I understand why google makes a lot of secrets about their technology and "ideas". Even Google has some hundreds of "the smartes" peoples in their company - Google didn't found any really new idea in the last years.

To get new and more money in each day Google now would going to be "the biggest mobile operator", the biggest ISP for africa and middle east, the biggest satellite operator and so on. They have no experience in a lot of things they are "postulating" to do.

Googles search technology could acting as a "knowledge" or "information" access system? Why we wont such a unique system? I wont this. A search engine could not decide wich information is right and wich is wortheless. Sometimes "the true" is depending from a viewers point or a question. To get most out of the internet (and into it) we need a wide spreaden infrastructure - in the physical network as in the access technologies. This is a simple fact - but far to go for the most users - they are putting in one or two keywords and are still happy with the results wich Google is feeding them.

Google is a seeking engine - nothing more and nothing less. Google has enough to do to provide a successful service on his search engine in the next years. But there are no really breaking ideas - so they are trying to get into all possible ideas (independent from if it can be realized...). Google is like a Church - a lot of peoples just believing them - and put in their money and hope for a "better time"...

We all don't need a Google-Internet - we need Google as one service on the net - as a really good search engine (and sometimes a little more look over).

Personally i give Google not more then 5-10 years (i hope less then that - but wiseness comes slowly).

best regards,

Niels Dettenbach.
http://www.syndicat.com