14 DAY TRIAL // Google has abandoned a project which aimed to digitize the newspaper archives of the world. The ambitious project was right up Google's alley, it's already digitizing millions of books, but the company has decided to end all efforts and focus on other technologies and tools.
The company sent an email to publishers involved in the project, informing them of the news. Google didn't go into too many details, but said that it will no longer be continuing to scan the archives it had already received.
Google confirmed the move and said that it will not be shutting down the site, but it will no longer be maintaining it or adding new content itself.
"We work closely with newspaper partners on a number of initiatives, and as part of the Google News Archives digitization program we collaborated to make older newspapers accessible and searchable online," Google told Search Engine Land.
"These have included publications like the London Advertiser in 1895, L’Ami du Lecteur at the turn of the century, and the Milwaukee Sentinel from 1910 to 1995," the Google spokesperson said.
"Users can continue to search digitized newspapers at news.google.com/archivesearch, but we don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing," Google added.
Google had launched the program in 2008. It partnered with several newspapers to help them digitize their archives. But the amount of work needed seems to have overwhelmed even Google which has decided to call it quits.
Plenty of archives are now available online and users are able to browse the issues by date or search for particular terms throughout the archives. But Google also managed to scan quite a lot of content that hasn't been added online yet.
Google plans to return what it has managed to scan so far to the newspapers and it will add new content from third-party websites if it becomes available.