200 years of news online

Google is launching the Google News Archive Search allowing users to explore existing digitised newspaper articles spanning the last 200 years. From BBC News:

..People using the search are shown results from both free and subscription-based news outlets. Partners in the project include the websites of US newspaper the New York Times and the Guardian from the UK. Other sources include news aggregators, websites which collect and display news stories from multiple sources. "The goal here is to be able to explore history as it unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, an engineer at Google and one of the team behind the project. It's fascinating to see how people's attitudes and emotions have changed through time."..

The company is also expanding into areas other than search. In August it announced plans to offer consumers the chance to download and print classic novels free of charge. "I'm strongly in favour of the democratisation of access to historical documents, but also cautious about how much information Google now controls," said Professor Roy Rosenzeig, a historian from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in the US. He says that increasingly the model of how we access information and what information we have access to is changing, as public archives such as libraries are replaced by private companies. But, he says, he is "extremely excited" about Google's latest offering. "As a scholar and historian I want as much information as possible, accessible to as many people as possible at the least cost, and the extent to which Google is doing that is compelling."