Google News Archive

By dabilendabilen (1255640079|%a, %b %e at %I:%M%p)

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Google News Archive: the new age of looking at the old age

Over the past 2 years our favorite online e-ventor has been putting a significant amount of resources to one of their new products —> Google News Archive. This product aims to bring newspaper articles dating back to the invention of the printing press and print media to the finger tips of users.

How do they do this? Google has actually partnered up with other firms to digitize hundreds of thousands of old newspapers. This combined effort has been deemed the News Archive Partner Program

From my experience, I have been able to take advantage of this tool in order to see when the Solar Energy Industry started to garner attention in print media. To my surprise there seemed to be significant activity in the area as early as 1950. This kind of information has helped me understand the roots of the industry, and from there tailor future blog posts to accurately cover the history and true evolution of the green energy world, clearly with focus on solar energy.

Interface

Query

Much like any google search, all your favorite syntax discriminators can help refine your search in Google News Archives to make sure you get the most relevant results. Given the size of Google's archives here, it is important to take advantage of as many of these discriminators as possible.

Timeline

One of the coolest features of Google News Archives is the interactive timeline. This timeline shows activity regarding your query from present until as far back as relevant results exist. Once this timeline shows up you can click on a decade of interest, and then a year of interest. From here your results will be shown relevant to the selected time/era.

Hence, this feature lets you quickly navigate and focus your search given your preference for dates or simply selecting the time of greatest activity.

Pros/Cons

Pros Cons
Usability Interface is intuitive, if you understand Google search, you should feel right at home here Side-Scrolling seems to be an issue, one must drag and drop the viewfinder in the archive search
Cost With hundreds of thousands of articles in this database there is free access to tons of media that would be otherwise inaccessible Many articles come at a cost of anywhere from $3.00 - $10.00 and up, this can get frustrating when the majority of search results are not free
Breadth Certain queries generate results dating back over 100 years spanning and 100s of different newspaper subscriptions, with this scope you are bound to find almost any major topic of interest It seems for the time being that results are restricted to domestic newspaper, but hey you got to start somewhere

User Manual1

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1. Search bar - Enter queries to search within the archive selection

2. Browsing options - These buttons control viewing options. A good tip is that clicking on the "Newspaper Title - Date" link will jump the browser to the first page of the paper, scaled to your browser window size

3. Headlines - By scrolling over headlines you can isolate individual articles

4. Link to article - Click on this link then on the headline of an article and you will now be able to share that article with a friend

5. Get this newspaper - Clicking this link will take you to the newspaper's own web page, allowing you to easily sign up for a subscription, or even an RSS feed.

6. Viewing pane - Using this pane you can more easily navigate through the paper.

7. Related articles - Using your query and selected article, this area will display other relevant results

Personal Testaments

If nothing else this search engine is a great way to waste hours of time learning all kinds of stuff that will let you rock your friends' worlds next time you play jeopardy or who wants to be a millionaire.

If this does not meet your news needs try Google Fast Flip. This is a service to quickly scan e-newspaper covers. Yup, Google does have it all? I actually knew the answer to your question via Google Premonitions, it is still in beta, but up for full scale release in 2023.

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