New Google News newspaper archive search can be monetized

Google News is already a website I use daily to find world news in just about every imaginable category and it is expanding again, as Tom Taulli wrote about this morning. This time, though, Google News is adding quite a bit of heft as the new Google News will feature over 200 years of archived newspaper stories through Google News. So, instead of present news being such a focus, you can get your fix on news from the last couple of centuries soon.

And, just what does the blogosphere have to say about this rather enlightening Google announcement? Marshall over at TechCrunch sees certain limits in the archives already (but hey, it was just released), Frank over at MarketWatch basically summarizes Google's oldies a bit and John Markoff at the New York Times runs down a nice factual quote that says this new Google archive service helps to index the last part of the "dark web" -- informational pieces that weren't indexed yet anywhere on Google's search engine -- which means they were hard, if not impossible, to find on the web.

Google's apparently goal here is to allow customers to view history as it unfolded using Google News as the ultimate almanac and newspaper source in one centralized location. In what looks like a result of the "20% personal project" time that all Google employees receive to follow personal passions and project dreams, Anurag Acharya, who developed the Google Scholar service, said this: "Users can see how viewpoints changed over time for events, for ideas and for people". That's quite a mission statement for just a sliver of the overall Google universe. The news archive can be found live right now now at Google News already.

Services such as these come from Google employees who dedicate 20% of their work time to pursuing personal projects, although the projects that are approved, like Google News, must be what customers have asked for. When it launched years ago Google News was just this and now the service is indispensable to millions. There comes the pickle: if the Google News service is used voraciously by millions every day why isn't Google making money off it to diversify its revenue from direct Internet searches to its hugely-popular news aggregation site?

One thing that Google has not implemented here with this new service is embedded advertising, like Google AdWords. Google said it has no plans to embed advertising links alongside archive search results, although sites with historical news may choose to feature advertising or charge subscription fees for access to the relevant items, just like normal news websites that Google News links to in its aggregation News site. In my opinion, Google should carefully weigh the effect of its text-based ads and insert them where appropriate into the Google News service as a way to further expand its advertising viewership outside of pure Internet search.