Today Google unveiled a corner of the Invisible Web by introducing its “Google News Archive” service, that allows searchers to perform archival and historical searching of newspapers and journals, back many years.
The content itself is supplied by newspapers on the Web, ranging from the New York Times and BusinessWeek Online, to the Houston Chronicle, Washington Post, CNN, Chicago Tribune, NPR, WSJ Interactive, USAToday, and hundreds or more. Google News Archive also taps into several news aggregators, such as HighBeam, NewsBank, AccessMyLibrary and others.
While some of the articles that a search uncovers are free, others will cost a few dollars to view in fulltext, depending on the policy of the paper or aggregator.
I did a variety of searches this morning to test out Google News Archive. I did several tests to find old article on Ken Lay and Enron….found some interesting results like this one.
I discovered that many of Google’s normal search protocols are applicable (eg quotation marks for phrases; the use of plusses, minuses, and the OR operator). A couple of additional very useful search filters available on Google News Archive are the ability to limit by date (and unlike limiting a general Web search by date, dates are normally unambiguous on published news articles, and so date limits actually work here), by name of publication, and by price/free.
From our test searches I made some initial observations. Overall I liked this service, if nothing else to provide another option for locating news archives, and particularly if one likes using the Google interface and search protocols. I also was pleasantly surprised to find the depth of this archive–1989? no further…1920? no further…I found a link to an article from 1763! Now, admittedly these were links to aggregators like
NewspaperArchive.com, but still it was a nice find…It also looks like there is about a one week minimum lag time before new articles are added (you can go to the regular Google News to retrieve more recent articles).
I also liked the fact that when the results were returned, it was easy to click on a year, or a name of a source, linked on the left hand bar to instantly refine the search.
I found a few odd or non-working aspects of Google News Archive too. A few of the links to the articles didn’t work, which is never completely surprising on any service. The method for ranking articles is something of a mystery. Google explained how they rank like this:
News archive search aims to rank results such that the articles/events that would be of interest to users exploring history appear first. We take into account the full text of each article, the publication in which the article appears, how often the underlying event has been referred to or described, in what manner and by whom.
That sounds good, in that there is some thought put behind the method, but I wish I had more options in changing how the articles were displayed based on what I’d like to see.
Also, I found that a link to an NPR audio was going to cost me some money to download on NewsBank, but I believe I could get that free by going directly to the NPR.org site. That’s just a reminder to not assume that a link where you’re going to have to pay is necessarily your only option–there may be free choices as well–and of course, don’t forget that you can get up from your PC and take a stroll to your library and probably get the article there too!
I plan on doing a more comprehensive review in an upcoming issue of The Information Advisor.
Let me know too on this blog how you’ve found searching Google News Archive.
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The site’s down now. I ran some searches this morning and it was okay, not great. Doesn’t seem like there’s a lot sources in the archive.
Comment by LJNDawson — September 6, 2006 @ 1:41 pm
I’d be interested in seeing a complete listing of sources–the big names seem to be represented though, and then there are all of the sources that are part of the aggregators (like HighBeam) that the archive taps into.
Comment by Robert Berkman — September 6, 2006 @ 2:47 pm
Google is showing links to content that no one can access unless they pay? BFD! They are working with other aggrgators mostly so basically its an aggragation of aggragators…again with no access.
This was done by yahoo a year ago and while its great to have there….I wonder how google gets so many people to drink their koolaid. I could have done this with $10,000 and some off the shelf software.
Comment by Darthvador — September 6, 2006 @ 11:26 pm
It’s too US centric. Hopefully this will change.
Comment by David Tebbutt — September 8, 2006 @ 11:09 pm
Darth–Yes, this could be better, but not all articles are fee-based, and for many people, information access via Google is a familiar and comfortable way to get news, so I think there is some value here, and hopefully Google will enhance it as time goes on.
David–Agreed. Ironically, one of the real benefits of the regular Google News is that it has NOT been US centric, and it would be nice to see this Archive reflect that as well
Comment by Robert Berkman — September 11, 2006 @ 9:29 am
We at ISI Emerging Markets (www.securities.com) have allowed a significant slice of data to be indexed to this service, hopefully helping to allay the US-centricity. this means you can do a search on the archivs for an obscirue byut listed Mexican company and get more and more relevant results on the News Archive than you can on regular Google.
We are unsure about the revenue inmplications behind this initiative, and we are waryof Google’s intentions. ut for now, we are willing to open our kimono a bit, and wait out the results. If the returns are there, for sure we will continue, but of course if the are not…
Comment by James hammond — September 15, 2006 @ 11:43 am