Google News- Archives

This in from the Washington Post:

“Earthquake and Flames Bring Death and Ruin to City of San Francisco”

The greatest earthquake disaster in the history of the United States visited San
Francisco early yesterday morning. The earthquake was followed by a fire which was still burning at 2 a.m. to- day, and which has covered most of the affected area.

Of course, this tidbit is from Apr 19, 1906, following the Great Quake.

Google Inc. just added newspaper archives to its Google News, so searching through time just became easier. This was one of several articles that popped up during a search of “san francisco quake 1906”.

Reuters had this to say:

Archive Search instantly generates a timeline of stories on a particular subject over the years, allowing Web surfers to target particular dates, or to observe how coverage of an issue has evolved over time…

Archival search adds historical and chronological dimensions to Google News, which since it first was launched in 2002, has allowed people to use keywords to search for the latest news from recent weeks in thousands of publications.

Starting immediately, users of Google News will find a News Archive Search link as an alternative to searching the wider Web or zeroing in on breaking news.

Many of the articles that popped up from the above Google News search were links to NewspaperArchive.com which is scanning a page a second into its collection. Currently, they have over 45,000,000 images stored.

College students and historical researchers will surely find this much more convenient than microfilm.