Google has announced a new mammoth undertaking that will bring the past 30 years of print journalism online, through a partnership with around 100 newspaper publishers. The new feature which ties in with the company’s book-scanning operation will make fully searchable newspaper pages available to the public that will appear just as they did when they were originally printed.
The new feature was announced at the TechCrunch50 Conference (Sept 8-10) where a demonstration showed how the project put the scanned documents into context with related articles from other papers displayed on the right hand side of the page.
Google plans to run its Adsense advertising next to the documents using a revenue share model, so that all parties benefit from the endeavor. This seems a wise move and has likely contributed to the search giant’s success in garnering support from so many publishers.
The newspaper scans will be zoomable, much like Google Maps and will display all the original content including headlines and advertisements, giving you a feel for the times. Google created a new algorithm for the project that works in conjunction with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to enable the billions of pages of newsprint to be searchable.
Sources:
BBC
Via: TechDigest