Google is unveiling a news archive that includes past articles provided by a long list of publishers, including
The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal,
The Washington Post
and
Time. It also includes sections of the archives from massive online storehouses, like LexisNexis, Factiva and HighBeam. Until now, Google News was only good for the present, generally
keeping stories for up to 30 days. The archives service is actually going to be a good thing for newspaper and magazine publishers, some of whom have had mixed feelings about news aggregators like
Google News because they spread readership thin. In fact, Agence France-Presse, France's major news organization, has sued Google for at least $17.5 million in damages for linking to its stories
without permission. However, now that Google News is sending traffic to older stories, making them easier to find (news services' search engines can be poor), and driving incremental ad revenue for
publishers, it's tough to see how publishers can complain. Google isn't even collecting any sales commissions this time; it just wants people to have another reason to use its services. Vivian
Schiller, svp and general manager of NYTimes.com, agrees that there's "a tremendous hunger out there for our archives."
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