Google annouced this morning that they are expanding the already massive News Archive search by “partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.” Google is  bringing the historical newspaper articles online, one newspaper at a time. Google’s Marissa Mayer demonstrated the new technology today at TechCrunch50. The articles are scanned, and optical character recognition can distinguish between headlines and text. This is an outgrowth of the technologies Google uses to scan books, but it is more advanced and tuned to newsprint pages. If you’ve ever used a microfiche, the experience is remarkably similar. A tumbnailed view is presented at the right of the screen and contains a draggable selection box that allows you to “flip” through the paper. Pages can also be navigated Acrobat-style by entering a page number or clicking forward/back buttons. A side panel will display relveant articles as well as contextual AdSense ads, with Google and the publishers splitting revenue. They’ve also promised to drive new newspaper subscriptions by adding a “get this paper” link.

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 2:12 pm | by Kur-nia-one |