Google announced yesterday at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco that it’s partnering with around 100 newspapers to digitize old issues and make them available online. Readers will be able to see entire pages of the old papers, and, using a new algorithm, be able to skip directly to the article they want, according to the BBC.
Announcing the move, Google’s vice president of search products, Marissa Mayer, told the audience:
"This is huge. We’re branching into a new form of content."
"The compelling part of the product for me is to get a sense of context and the importance of what else happened that day."
It actually builds on something that the company has been doing for the last two years, working with both the Washington Post and New York Times to index old issues in Google News Archive.
AdSense will be part of the whole program, of course, and Google will share revenue with the newspaper publishers.
