Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Looks like printed newspapers are not going away…they are just going be searchable on Google.com.  The search giant is partnering with  various print / media companies from across North America to digitize millions of archived newspapers and making them all searchable. Google has allowed visitors to search a limited amount of old newspapers since 2006 through their partnerships with the New York Times and Washington Post existing digital archives. However this new initiative, which was announced today, will greatly expand the amount of content in their archives.

From the Official Google Blog:

“Today, we’re launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. Let’s say you want to learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for [Americans walk on moon], and you’ll be able to find and read an original article from a 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.”

These digital newspapers will be searchable through Google News just like they were printed - photographs, headlines, content, ads, etc. Google will gradually be adding the digital newspapers to search results through Google News and the Google News Archive. However, the key thing to note is that Google will also “start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well”. That is a lot of content that will be added to Google’s search index..a lot of content they can then monetize. Google states that this is only the beginning and their goal is to make every newspaper digital and searchable.

So how exactly does SEO for old newspapers work?

• Google plans RSS feeds for web search results