Google Gives Nod to the Value of Archived News

Google adds a feature to Google News, labeled News archive search, in which it has partnered with several news aggregators and news providers to provide its users easier access to deep archives of news. In a few instances this goes back more than 100 years, but most of the data is from the 1990s through the present, it would seem. News aggregators Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, High-Beam and possibly others provide slices of their deep archives. MSM folks like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post are there too.

It's a bit too early to digest the full impact of this. But I see it as a nod by information giant Google toward the value of high-quality deep news archives. Google News users have often been stymied by a news search that only goes back a month or so. This will allow users to go further and push traffic to Factiva and the others. Google says it doesn't get revenue when users purchase individual documents from the vendors but that it's doing this as a way to provide more complete information to its users.