What Dave Barney Said about Google Newspapers!

Please note that the link to Dave Barney's presentation is no longer available but the transcription of a part of his presentation is below.

Did any of you see Dave Barney's presentation, "Google Search . . . And Beyond" at RootsTech 2013 a few days ago?  [Note:  the video presentation is no longer available.]  He's the guy from google.com -- a software engineer, to be exact.  I heard him say something that was really exciting.  After he explained ways to search google newspapers he said,

Now, here's the plug.  When I was here last year I showed this newspaper thing and someone said, "Wait a minute.  I just heard not too long ago that google was cancelling their newspaper thing."

Google thought this was a great idea to scan newspapers.  They invested all this money.  They acquired all these newspapers, they scanned them to OCR, they made them available.  But unfortunately no one was using it.  And google's a very data driven company and they said, "No one's using this feature so we're not going to have it anymore."  They said, "We're not gonna take away the stuff we already have.  The newspapers we already have scanned we'll keep them up forever.  They'll always be available.  But we're not gonna spend money scanning new newspapers because no one's using it."

Well, that's our problem.  If we use this, if you start using this feature, people will start saying, "Oh, wow, people are using our newspapers.  They are searching on 'em and finding information in them."  Then maybe internally and externally we can convince google to resume this and start acquiring more newspapers.  So it already has tremendous value with the content they've already acquired but just a plug to everyone out there to uh, you know, use this feature.  See what you can find on it and perhaps with the increased usage we can convince google to resume that effort.

This -- this! -- is what's really important:
"Perhaps with the increased usage we can convince google to resume this effort [of scanning newspapers and making them available]."

Do you use google newspapers?  Oh, please, do!  I hope you'll start using them if you don't already.  If you already use them I hope you'll use them more often.  Go to news.google.com/newspapers to find a list of newspaper you can browse and/or search.  I use the newspapers at least once a week, sometimes for hours at a time, and sometimes more than once a week.  I hope you'll start using them more, too.  I don't think we can ever have too many newspapers online, especially when they're free.

--Nancy.

Copyright ©2013-2017 Nancy Messier. All Rights Reserved.
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