Google abandons newspaper scanning project

[Davey]

Google has abandoned a project to digitise and index millions of pages of archive newspapers after five years...

The project sought to circumvent tricky copyright issues dating from the pre-internet age. By posting image files rather than text files online, it was thought newspapers would not have to negotiate rights to republish freelance content from the pre-internet era, according to The Boston Phoenix, another partner in the effort.
"The [scanning] process may have turned out to be harder than Google anticipated," the newspaper speculated.

Read the whole article over here

i'm sure some of you knew that Google tried to do this, but I wanted to share it with you guys because it can be pretty interesting to read through very old news papers.

The oldest one is the Halifax Gazette from march 23rd 1752:
The Halifax Gazette - Google News Archive Search

Link of the archief:
Google News Archive Search

 

[thomas]

I wasn't aware of that project, what a pity! Anyhow, thanks for sharing.

 

[sudarshanmakoto]

It sounds to be a herculean task and It is sad to know that the project is abandoned