Google Offers News Back To The 1700’s

Today Google announced the latest development in their search technology, a way to search news stories dating as far back as the 1700’s.

“The goal of the service is to allow users to explore history as it unfolded,” said Anurag Acharya, a top Google engineer who helped develop the news archive search.

“Users can see how viewpoints changed over time for events, for ideas and for people,” said Acharya, who also built the Google Scholar service for academic researchers and once was a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Searchers that wish to use this service, (with content provided from companies like LexisNexis, Factiva, Accessmylibrary.com, and other major news reporting agencies) can access it using Google News beginning today. You’ll find the advanced search feature in the top right hand corner.

This seems like a logical way to categorize information, but a test search for “Leonardo Da Vinci” brought no results past 1999. A revisit to the site gave me a big 404 error, so it must still be in “beta.”

We’ll see how fast this project grows in the next few months..

Resource: CNN