Google News Launches Archive Service with WSJ, NYT, Lexis and Others; No Direct Revenues

Finally, some additions to Google News, after being relatively-dormant in terms of functionality since it launched in 2002…also, it points to a much-discussed hybrid-free-plus-premium-news services that everyone has talked about and some other news search sites are doing already.
The Google News Archive Search will users to search through the archives of newspapers, magazines and other publications…it will direct Google searchers to both paid and free digital content on publishers’ sites, but will not directly generate revenue for Google. “We’re not focusing on monetization yet…This is new territory for us.”
Google would not state how many publishers were taking part in the new service…but has announced a number of partners including WSJ, NYT, WaPo, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale.
SEW: Google has no plans to become a content aggregator itself, or to even offer a streamlined payment system where you can use your Google account to pay for content, according to Google content partnerships director Jim Gerber.
WSJ: Consumers will be able to search the full text of articles using keywords and to view snippets of the articles grouped chronologically on Google’s site, before going to the origin site, where they may have free or paid access.
NYT said it will make available more than two million articles dating as far back as 1981…Time magazine will provide free access to the magazine’s archives dating back to its founding in 1923. (That 200-years plus old archives is a spin—I’m not buying it)
IDG: It doesn’t return links to multimedia content, nor does it include links to reference material like books and encyclopedias, and it is not linked with Google’s Book Search service.
Reuters: News articles in a number of other languages can also be uncovered, including Spanish. Results are based on relevance, with no favoritism shown to any of Google’s partners, officials said.

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