Google Brings History Online

Around the globe, it is estimated that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And Google's goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper, up to the largest national daily.

The problem is that most of these newspapers are not available online. Google wants to change that.

Today, Google is 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.

Let's say you want to learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for [Americans walk on moon] on Google News Archive Search, and you'll be able to find and read an original article from a 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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.

In 2006, Google started working with publications like the New York Times and theWashington Post to index existing digital archives and make them searchable via the Google News Archive. One of their partners, the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, is actually the oldest newspaper in North America, which has been publishing continuously for more than 244 years.

You’ll be able to explore this historical treasure by searching the Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. Stories scanned under the name you searched for will appear alongside already-digitized material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators, and are marked "Google News Archive." 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.