Search Engine Watch — Google As News Archivist

Mary Ellen Bates — 22 November 2006

Until recently, it was difficult to find news archives on the web more than 30 days old. That’s changed in a big way with the advent of Google’s News Archive search. [Snip]

But last September, Google rolled out its “200-year” News Archive Search, offering full-text content from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and third-party sources such as LexisNexis, HighBeam and Thomson Gale. You can search the News Archive at http://news.google.com/archivesearch, or by clicking the “News archive search” at the Google News page. If Google detects that your regular web search query would retrieve archived articles, it sometimes even includes those in the search results page.

Ms Bates takes a closer look at the service I mentioned in passing near the end of the item, The latest news at your fingertips, in early September. As she says, it’s no substitute for fee-based services such as Factiva or LexisNexis but not everyone has access to them or can afford their subscriptions.