• September 9, 2008

Google's quest to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" has led the giant to newspapers, and an initiative to digitize and index millions of old issues.

On Monday, the search giant announced that would be partnering with multiple newspaper publishers, including the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, and information aggregators ProQuest and Heritage, to help get all the back issues and archives indexed. Using the Google News Archive, or the timeline refinement after querying Google News, searchers will be able to browse through entire issues, including photographs, headlines, articles and ads.

"Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written," said Punit Soni, product manager, in a post on the Official Google Blog. "And it's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.

Soni said that archived news clips would eventually be blended into the main search results via Universal Search, and that the company would continuously work to get international newsprint indexed as well.--Tameka Kee