Google to offer print archives searches

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- Google has planned to offer a service, which will permit Internet users to search through the archives of newspapers, magazines and other publications.

The service will help Internet searchers uncover material, which in some cases dates back more than 200 years, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The new feature, to be named Google News Archive Search, will direct Google searchers to both paid and free digital content on publishers' Web sites, but will not directly generate revenue for Google, according to the report.

Google would not announce that how many publishers were taking part in the new service, for which Google has independently indexed material from online databases and will display the results both as part of standard searches and through a new archive search page, news.google.com/archivesearch, said the report.

However, it announced a number of partners including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale, the report added.

In contrast to Google's book scanning project, which has led to legal skirmishes with some publishers over copyright issues, some of the partners involved with the new service said they had been pressing Google to offer access to their archives for several years.

The databases included in the service are part of what some have called the "dark Web," because they cannot be "spidered," or indexed, by standard search engines and thereby have not been accessible through them. Enditem

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-09/07/content_5060556.htm