How to search for historical newspapers in the Google News archive?

The Google News Archive contains thousands of historical newspapers digitized and available, almost all for free, to anyone who wants to read them. It represents an important research tool for reporters, faculty, and students, as well as for anyone in general who wishes to read about events that occurred in the past from the point of view of contemporary reporters.

What is Google News?

Google News, or Google Noticias as it is called in Spanish, is a news aggregation service provided by Google. It is a Google search engine specialized in news from hundreds of sources from around the world. Despite the fact that this service has been in operation for years, it only maintains news from the last 30 days, so it is not itself a source of historical press articles. For this purpose, the Google New Archive or the Google News archive was created.

What is Google News Archive?

The Google News Archive project emerged in 2008 with the mission of digitizing all print newspapers published over hundreds of years of history. The intention was to create an easily navigable digital archive that would make it easy to get to any historical item you needed. However, Google ended the project and stopped digitizing newspapers in May 2011, just three years after it started.

Despite this, in the short time it was active, the Google News Archive program managed to scan and digitize nearly 1 million pages from more than 2,000 newspapers, including newspapers from as far back as the mid-18th century. The good news is that after the project closed, they kept the archive of all the articles that had been scanned and digitized to date, and you can still read them at news.google.com/newspapers .

But how to find an article of interest among almost a million scanned pages? We would expect the archive to have advanced search tools that would allow us to find what we are looking for quickly. However, this is not so. For this reason, here are some keys or tips on how to carry out a search for historical newspapers in the Google News archive.

Tips for searching historical newspapers in the Google News archive

Tip #1: Check if the newspaper you are looking for is in the archive.

If you are looking for an article published in a particular newspaper, the first thing to do is to make sure that the newspaper in question has been digitized and is present in the archive. Otherwise, any effort we make will be in vain. You might think that this involves doing some kind of search within the file, but there is a much faster and easier way to do it.

Opening the Google News Archive page, the first thing we find is an alphabetical list of all the newspapers in the archive. Each newspaper has a small entry that includes the name of the publication, the number of editions or issues of that newspaper available on file, and the date range of all available issues. With the information presented on this page, we will be able to know immediately if the file will be of any use to us or not.

To quickly find the publication that interests us, just do a small text search within the page by pressing the CTR+F keys on Windows or Chrome OS, or the CMND+F keys on MacOS and typing the full name or part of the name of the newspaper of interest. If there is no result, it is advisable to check that the spelling is correct. Sometimes it also helps to search without the use of articles like “el”, “ le ”, or “ the ”.

Once the newspaper is found, it is important to make sure that the file contains issues within the date range in which the article we are looking for was published. For example, if we are interested in finding contemporary articles related to the start of the Second World War, it will not help us if only editions prior to the 20th century are digitized.

Tip #2: Don’t use the archive search engine. Instead, do a web search.

As mentioned at the beginning, the archive’s browser is not particularly good nor does it allow advanced searches to narrow down the results. This often makes it difficult to obtain articles relevant to our investigation. For this reason, it is preferable to do the search directly from the Google web search engine.

However, we must make sure to restrict the results to the articles found in the archive. For this, a search is carried out by site ( site search , in English). To do this, it is only necessary to include the command site:news.google.com/newspapers . This command forces Google to search only within the news.google.com/newspapers site, which is where the file is located.

Note that Google search commands are case sensitive and searching by website will only work if the site: command is typed in lower case.

Tip #3: Restrict results to specific newspapers.

If we already know in which newspaper we want to search and we already verify that it is in the archive, we can go on to search for the articles of interest. To prevent unwanted newspaper results from appearing, we can restrict the search by including the name of the newspaper in quotes.

Tip #4: Restrict results by dates

Google’s advanced search option that allows you to restrict results by date does not allow you to do so for dates prior to 1970. For this reason, in order to restrict searches to a specific date range, we must resort to creativity.

One way to achieve filtering by year or by a particular date is to enclose the date or year in quotes.

Tip #5: Browse the newspaper

For one reason or another, sometimes Google searches don’t provide the results we expect to find. The main cause is that Google cannot read the content of the scanned images, in which case it obviously will not be able to find the words we are looking for in the titles or content of the articles.

In these cases, it is advised that we simply manually check the edition of the newspaper in which we are looking for our article on the publication’s website or in a newspaper library.

References

Keller, J. (2011, May 22). Google Shuts Down Newspaper Archive Project . The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/google-shuts-down-newspaper-archive-project/239239/

A note about searching Google Scanned Newspaper archives . (2021, October 27). SearchReSearch. http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-note-about-searching-google-scanned.html

Richard Byrne. (2015, February 27). How to Use the Google Newspaper Archive [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq9oKtErzWU

This Is How to Search Google’s Scanned Newspaper Archives . (2013, December 10). Educational Technology and Mobile Learning. https://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/12/this-is-how-to-search-googles-scanned.html