Google to digitise "every newspaper ever written"

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 9 Sep 2008 at 10:00

Google has announced ambitious plans to team up with newspaper publishers around the world to archive "billions of news pages containing every story ever written".

The search giant says it will partner with newspaper publishers to digitise their vast archives, allowing users to not only search the text of old articles, but browse through images of the printed pages.

Google says it plans to integrate the archives into its Google News service. "Stories we've scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already-digitised material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators, and are marked 'Google News Archive'," the company claims in a blog post.

"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."

Access to those valuable archives won't necessarily be free, however. Users are charged $3.95 to read the full version of articles already digitised from the New York Times, for example.

Several newspapers, including The Times and The Guardian in the UK have already launched their own online newspaper archives, casting doubt on whether they would be willing to work with Google.

Google has signed up several US and Canadian publishers for the project, but has yet to reveal details of any UK partners.