Explore History as it Happened: Google News Now Has Archive Search

Announcement
September 5, 2006

Google users can now discover a wealth of historical information when they search. Available today, Google News now has archive search to help users quickly and easily search for events, people and ideas over different periods of time. History buffs and curious users alike can explore more than 200 years of historical information to get a glimpse of the emotions and attitudes of the past.

When users search for an historical event or person, they will see the most relevant articles related to their query, and they will be able to browse an historical timeline to get a broader overview of the results. For example, searching for information about the 1969 moon landing will showcase original news written in 1969, as well as more recent coverage from the last four decades of analysis. Articles related to a story or theme within a given time period are grouped together to allow users to see more perspectives on the events. Users can also narrow their searches to specific time periods or publications of interest.

Users can search archives from Google News (news.google.com) by clicking on the ‘News Archive Search’ link. For selected queries, users of Google web search (www.google.com) may also see links to the top three related articles from the news archives integrated at the bottom of the result page.

Google is working with many prominent information providers to help users discover relevant historical information. This includes freely available articles from sources such as TIME.com, The Guardian, and many others, as well as snippets of articles available for a fee or via a subscription, such as those from news organizations like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, and from news aggregators like AccessMyLibrary.com from Thomson Gale, Factiva, HighBeam™ Research, LexisNexis and others. When searching news archives, results are ranked based on relevance.

Today, the service is being launched on the news.google.com domain and enables searching of articles in English as well as articles in a number of other languages. Our goal is to include even more global content in our news archive search, and we’re working with international partners to make their content available. We also plan to introduce the service in other countries as well.

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