Google archive search makes history
Search goliath Google last month turned heads when it launched its News Archive Search, an online retrieval service that can find news articles going back 200 years in some cases.
The new service – at http://News.google.com/archivesearch – is a deal between Google and a host of media providers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, plus some news archive services like LexisNexis.
Not all the material is free.
If you search for articles on the German siege of Leningrad, for example, Time magazine archive items will be available at no cost. But you’ll be charged a small fee for Washington Post articles.
Not all the providers have been able to go back 200 years. The New York Times only offers stories back to 1981, though it’s planning to make a much larger portion of its archive available for search.
Still, Google’s historical news search has a couple of nice features. A click on a timeline link on the search results page produces a chronological order of stories, either oldest to newest or reversed order. A side set of links also let you drill down to content within a given decade or a given year. A blue arrow icon will point out events of significant interest.
Search acronyms
Acronyms placed inside a search can produce a mixed bag of results.
Some search engines understand what you mean when you use the term ASAP, others don’t. Now, there’s a whole field of search-engine development pushing toward clearly established meanings for acronyms based on the context of other terms in the search.
One site that shows you the common meanings for acronyms is Microsoft adCenter Labs, at http://adlab.microsoft.com/ acResol/default.aspx.
The site can be a useful resource for identifying various meanings a common acronym can produce. For example, “MS” will produce the most common meaning, multiple sclerosis. It also pops out 11 other optional choices, including mass spectrometry and Microsoft.
If you think “ROI” will always return a result for return on investment, you’re wrong. The adCenter site finds that the most common use of that acronym is region of interest.