f l u e n c y f u m b l e

BusinessWeek online reports that Google has added a service to its search lineup. With the help of the new news archive search, curious Googlers will find at their fingertips old — sometimes really old — snips from more than 250 years of scanned-in print publications. BW writes:

One of the prevailing beliefs about Google is that its search engine inevitably devalues Internet content. Why pay $2.50 for, say, an archived magazine article when you can use Google to find a free (and possibly illegal) copy of it on the Internet? Taking that reasoning to its logical conclusion, online publishers of paid content are destined for extinction.

A new product being released by Google (GOOG ) on Sept. 6 undermines such notions. Google News Archive Search will make more than 200 years of news content searchable to all users, the company says. The content will come from publishers and aggregators such as The New York Times, Time magazine, The Guardian, LexisNexis, and Factiva, many of which charge fees for archived content.

Fees for archived content?

This service, by virtue of that stumbling block alone, is rendered pretty close to useless, at least for anyone who does not happen to have subscriptions to the databases searched. A quick trial run of the service will return a list of results from archiving sites that demand cash for articles — so Google is simply presenting me with a list of sites that would like to charge me money. “Awesome.”

Before writing it off entirely, I decided to see what I could get for free. I was granted whole-article access to two articles:

Time.com, a 1938 article about butter
USA Today baseball scores from 1990

And denied access from four:
The New York Times ($4.95)
The Boston Globe ($6.95)
The Philadelphia Inquirer ($2.95)
The Washington Post ($3.95)

So, at least, Time.com and USA Today online are willing to fork over content for the reasonable return of me looking at (or not looking at) the ads crowding the articles.

It certainly makes sense that Google isn’t going to pay subscription fees to the media giants so that its users the world over will have access to 250 years of archived content. I don’t blame them. And I’m not exactly sure why everyone on Slashdot (thread here) seems to have their drawers in a twist over the whole program. However, one commenter on that site makes a valid point that Project Gutenberg, a library of 17,000 free e-books, seems like a much better (read: free-er) way to lead Internet researchers to old-text paydirt.

Google “isn’t making money” from this enterprise.
Researchers probably aren’t getting much from this enterprise.
But publishers and their advertisers are sure to love not only the free traffic to news sites directed from the new Google search, but also the (theoretical) increase in archive sales.

… and they’re not paying Google for this?