Google Abandons Plan to Archive the World's Newspapers

This sounds like a major blow to genealogists as old newspapers will no longer be accepted on Google. The web search giant has informed partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers, and was instead focusing its energies on "newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites."

In an email, Google said it would continue to support the existing archives it has already scanned and indexed. However, Google does not plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the digitized news product. Google says it eventually scanned 60 million pages, covering 250 years. Many newspapers have been scanned but not yet indexed or placed online. The status of that "work in progress" remains unclear.

You can read more at: http://goo.gl/GMpzF.

My thanks to Roger Bartlett for telling me about this story.

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