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September 17, 2006
Old News? Google News!
I mentioned in a previous entry that the big news aggregators such as Lexis, Westlaw and Factiva sometimes struggle to deliver breaking news. Not so for most free web sites; they offer current stuff, often extremely current. If you want to know what happened in the last hour, check web news. Set up an alert on Yahoo News or Google News and you'll get up to the minute news in your inbox in very short order.
Older news is a whole different story. Most web news sites don't offer the deep historical archives like the premium aggregators, though there's been some progress in that area. For example, Topix now offers content going back as far as a year.
But the big development in archive news comes from, of course, Google. They recently announced their Google News Archive Search, with content going back over 200 years. Where do they get news that old? Google supplements the free web sources with the traditional, for-fee services that are willing to give you one article for a price.
Try running a search on Google News Archive, then click on the dates links on the left side, and explore. The farther back you go in time, the more for-fee content you'll see, labeled "Pay Per View" from such vendors as Proquest, Newsbank and the New York Times. Though I didn't spot any, apparently Factiva, LexisNexis Thomson Gale and Highbeam Research also offer content according to an article from Search Engine Watch, "Google Debuts 200 Year News Archive Search."
It's not just news. As noted by Robert Ambrogli , case law also pops up in the search results from services such as FastCase and LoisLaw.
Google News Archive is reminiscent of Northern Light Remember when they tried to do something very similar with their web search engine, incorporating premium content with free web sources? It didn't work too well for them, but then, they weren't Google.
If you're looking for news, old or new, you might want to start with Google News and Archive News. It won't do everything the big guys do, but if you're lucky, you may find what you want there, at a fraction of the price you might normally pay.
For more information see:
Google Debuts 200 Year News Archive Search, by Chris Sherman (SearchEngineWatch.com)
InfoToday Newsbreak, Traditional Information Industry Opens Premium Content to Google News Archive, by Barbara Quint
Comments
Is there a substantial difference in content for the same alert running on Yahoo News and Google News?
Posted by: Michael at October 2, 2006 03:27 PM
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