Changes to Google News Archive and search

[Ben Zimmer]

Wow, I wasn't aware of the 1970 cutoff for date-range searching.
That's rather disturbing. I'll see if I can find someone at Google who
can address why they made that change.

Hopefully this is just a temporary situation -- the pre-1970 material
is still all there, just difficult to search for.


On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 2:22 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole wrote:
>
> Thanks very much for your response Ben. I have seen that interface,
> and I did see that help page. What do you make of this sentence?:
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> Note that Google Web Search doesn’t support custom date ranges earlier
> than 1970 or content behind a paywall.
> [End excerpt]
>
> I just tried the suggested interface to perform a search between
> 1/6/1950 and 1/13/1960 for the word "freedom" and no matches were
> returned.
>
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 8:57 AM, ADSGarson O'Toole wrote:
>>>
>>> Google has made changes to the search interface for the Google News
>>> Archive of scanned newspapers. The changes appear to make the archive
>>> much more difficult to search effectively. If a list member would like
>>> to share ideas for searching this database please reply with a message
>>> on list or off list. Thanks.
>>
>> They don't make it easy, but Google News Archive can still be reliably
>> searched in a couple of ways. I keep this page bookmarked:
>>
>> https://news.google.com/news/advanced_news_search
>>
>> ...which makes a box pop up over the usual news search allowing you to
>> specify a date range in the archives. Or you can do a site search on
>> Google using <site:google.com/newspapers> and then select "custom
>> range" in the "search tools" pulldown menu. More info here:
>>
>> https://support.google.com/news/answer/1638638
>>

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