Thursday, March 28, 2013

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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14 comments:

  1. Nancy -

    I love the google news archive!! Often I find articles from the Toledo Blade in my searches. Thanks for the informative post! I will continue to search newspapers archived on Google!!

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    Replies
    1. Isn't it wonderful when we find one or two newspapers located in our area of research? There's so much available, even in just one newspaper. Thanks for visiting and leaving a comment, Dorene.

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  2. Very interesting, Nancy, as much as I use Google, I have not used their newspaper archive. I'm perusing now!

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    1. Oh, Teresa, I hope you found some newspaper for your area(s).

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  3. This is great stuff - I had no idea this existed. Thanks for pointing it out and I'll be using this feature in the future!

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    1. Hi, Debi. I hope you found some newspapers that will be helpful to you.

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  4. Replies
    1. You're welcome, Terri. I hope you find a local newspaper and lots of info.

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  5. Great Info, Nancy. Thanks, Catherine

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  6. I have used this for some time and i love it

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    1. I'm so glad I'm not the only one who knows about google news. I love it, too!

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  7. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one in the dark about this feature. I plan to check into it NOW.

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    Replies
    1. I hope you found some helpful newspapers, Wendy. I love google news!

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I appreciate your comments and look forward to reading what you have to say. Thanks for stopping by.

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