14 DAY TRIAL // Google isn't only scanning and archiving millions of books in its Google Books project, it’s also adding newspaper archives to its online repositories going as far back as the 18th century. The newspaper digitization effort started almost a year ago and the search giant has recently updated the inventory, quadrupling the number of articles available, while bringing new publications to the archive.
“We've recently updated our index, quadrupling the number of articles included in News Archive Search. We now include articles from several new publications, including the Halifax Gazette, Sydney Morning Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Village Voice,” Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team, wrote on the Google News blog. “News Archive Search is an ongoing effort, and we're continuing to work with publishers to add new materials.”
Google doesn't give out exact numbers but the News Archive Search site launched with “millions” of articles in September 2008 puts the “quadrupling” in context. At this rate, Google is becoming the archive and the library of the world with millions of books and now millions of news articles available and plenty more coming. This amount of data has never been so accessible but the company does have an interest as it serves ads against some of the articles, though it may be a while before it starts seeing a positive return of investment as digitizing the works is a laborious and expensive undertaking.
Besides the aforementioned Halifax Gazette, Sydney Morning Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Village Voice, Google News Archive Search added other international titles and some of the oldest entries in the archive with the complete June 2, 1753 edition of the Halifax Gazette, which is actually searchable. While there has been plenty of controversy surrounding Google's digitization initiatives, it's hard to overstate the importance and scale of the company's undertakings in this area.