Google Historical Index

Google's New Historical Index

by Donna O'Hanlon
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 11 Sep 2007

Google has announced its plans to expand its news service. It will introduce a feature that will let users locate articles with historical information on events and people.

The service was launched on the 6th September, which contains links to articles predominantly linking to newspapers and magazines.

The Index built by Google contains links to articles which are already in the search engines web index, and others obtained by arrangement from publishers and news aggregators.

Google states that preference will not be given to links coming from their partner companies such as The New York Times, Time Magazine and Wall Street Journal. All results are based on the Relevance of the search query, in which almost 200 years of history is covered, and categorised in various ways such as chronological, publishers and topics. The service does not include links to reference material of multimedia content, nor is it linked to Google’s book service.

The index of links leads to free and fee-based articles. However, Google is not involved in monetary transactions between customers and publishers, nor do Google have any financial arrangement with publishers for access to articles.