Google builds massive digital newspaper archive

Google wants to put all the world's newspapers online, building up an incredible historical database
Google wants to put all the world's newspapers online, building up an incredible historical database

Google follows a cracking week last week, what with the announcement of its new Google Chrome browser, with what could well be equally momentous news this week – outlining its plans to build the biggest ever easily-searchable digital archive of the world's newspapers.

Google began archiving a select number of newspapers two years ago, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and is now looking to widen its net and work with many more newspaper publishers on this immense project,

according to its blog.

"We're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives," claims the search/ web browser giant.

"Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed – photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all."

Incredible news archive

The content will be available to search and view via the Google News Archive.

"Stories we've scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already-digitized material from publications like The New York Times as well as from archive aggregators," the post adds.

"Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we'll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you'll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well."

Adam Hartley