[Ads-l] Google News Archive Search Is Back

[Shapiro, Fred]

I've never known Ben to be wrong about anything, so I question his comment with uncertainty.  In 2022 I posted: "My impression was that Google News Archive has had its effectiveness crippled by lack of a global search capability." Bill Mullins responded as follows:

"Apparently so, and this is news to me.  There still is a page that used to allow you to search the archived newspapers, but it appears to be nearly worthless now.

https://news.google.com/newspapers

Browse to  a page of an old newspaper, find a phrase, and then attempt to use the search engine to find it again.  It doesn't work.

I don't know when they disabled it, but it's been in the last few years.  But I do know that they've been reducing its capabilities for a long time.  Searches I did 5-6 years ago were not as effective as the same search had been 12-15 years ago."

Whenever I would try searching Google News Archive, I would only retrieve a small number of recent hits.

Fred Shapiro



________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2023 1:00 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Google News Archive Search Is Back

I wasn't aware that Google News Archive (such as it is) ever lost its
search function. The main page at https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.google.com%2Fnewspapers&data=05%7C01%7Cfred.shapiro%40YALE.EDU%7Ce6e2ebbdbee24ca7324b08db8a0c1935%7Cdd8cbebb21394df8b4114e3e87abeb5c%7C0%7C0%7C638255556793082083%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=UGcmAucZ8KmQmJmOeDSKgJHcWJvARG4oKbsnWpTwh3c%3D&reserved=0<https://news.google.com/newspapers> is
still as it was before, and I've dipped in occasionally to look for things
that can't be found in other databases. (The holdings haven't been added to
in many years, as Fred suggests. The Village Voice, for instance, still has
very scattershot coverage, which is a shame given what a great resource
it could be.)

On Fri, Jul 21, 2023 at 10:17 AM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
wrote:

> I notice that the Google News Archive search capability has been
> resuscitated.  That should be exciting news, but, either because of massive
> misdatings or a coverage that is much smaller than newspapers.com, it
> doesn't seem to be that useful for antedating.
>
> Fred  Shapiro
>
>

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