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Print-Archives Searches by Google

Google is about to offer a new service that will allow Internet users to search through the archives of magazines, newspapers and other publications and find material that in some cases dates back more than 200 years. With the new Google News Archive Search, users will be directed to paid and free digital content on publishers` Web sites.

Google did not state how many publishers were taking part in the new project, however it announced a few partners including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Lexis-Nexis, Factiva, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale. The databases included in the service are part of the so-called "dark Web" because they cannot be "spidered," or indexed, by standard search engines and so have not been accessible through them.

In some cases the whole archive of publications like Time and The Washington Post will be reachable through Google search. Time`s entire database is already freely available and supported by advertising. The magazine made its archive, consisting of 4,300 issues and 300,000 articles dating back to 1923, available free through Time.com last month.