Update on the continuing demise of Google News Archive

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Update on the continuing demise of Google News Archive

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Update on the continuing demise of Google News Archive
Started by luckyshow, Oct 23 2013 10:50 PM
news archive research

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#1 luckyshow
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Posted 23 October 2013 - 10:50 PM

I just saw last night that Google News Archive has become even more useless.

I had a few high scoring Kentucky high school players' names for circa 1956 to 1959. So I would enter a name, their school, and a possible scoring feat like "58 points" and maybe the word basketball. I did this in the news archive, with no date range because I find it eliminates results.

Well, what do I see. That all the results for newspapers that charge to see the entire page, have no text at all under the link anymore. Just a <$2.95> If you click on them some have a bit of text, but as before, this was rarely including my search terms. Thatw as always in the text in the results listings. Yet now are page after page of links and $2.95. And since this is Google, there will be results, most of them, that don't actually use my search parameters. So who would pay $2.95 times hundreds of hits, to find what I am looking for?

So you can see how if it is not a free viewing, there is no use to me...Does anyone know anyone at Google?

Google has no more cache anywhere, for any result. YAhoo does. Why can't YAhoo have a true News Archive, even for just those pay pages. If they put in the text I would use it. I use their cache searches a lot now. Google seems to be trying for the simpleton crowd...

#2 classic3283
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Posted 30 October 2013 - 07:35 PM

That's too bad. I've used the abstracts a lot in my research. I fear that Google will one day just remove the service all together.

#3 Tod Maher
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Posted 31 October 2013 - 02:30 PM

It's really nothing new, the Google News Archive search results were never great to begin with. I have found lots of things "manually" going through their archives that never showed up in their search results.

The problem with Google News Archive is the OCR software they used was the same that they used for their book scanning project. Newspaper microfilm varies greatly in quality and clarity compared to books. Of course, no one at Google thought of this.

OCR technology has greatly improved in the last few years since Google did their scanning - see the fantastics results at Newspaper.com, which is now my favorite newspaper archive site.

#4 luckyshow
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Posted 31 October 2013 - 05:19 PM

The nature of some of my researcj is Needle ina Haystack random searching. I throw up a few terms and see nthe results. Now that they don't show any text for the results for pay pages, I have totally no idea if they mught be a good poage to pay for. ANd now it is impossible to change teh search terms to better "read" the particular result's text. Many times I figured out what I needed or what I needed to research furth in this regard, using this technique. I doubt they did this due too me. I wouldn't be spending oodles of bucks on those few I figured out that way and I doubt many others did it.

I can report they have put back the "cache" in regular searching, though it isn't so easy to know how to find it, so they will eventually drop it for small usage

#5 apbaball
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Posted 19 December 2013 - 04:08 PM

For some reason the search results have not been working at all the last two days. I used to be able to google "football" on any given day during the 1970 football season and get at least a dozen results. Now I am not getting a single article.

#6 BD Sullivan
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Posted 19 December 2013 - 06:14 PM

apbaball, on 19 Dec 2013 - 4:08 PM, said:
For some reason the search results have not been working at all the last two days. I used to be able to google "football" on any given day during the 1970 football season and get at least a dozen results. Now I am not getting a single article.

Same here; I put in a term I KNOW would have resulted in plenty of results, and got nothing.

#7 Reaser
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Posted 19 December 2013 - 06:31 PM

apbaball, on 19 Dec 2013 - 4:08 PM, said:
For some reason the search results have not been working at all the last two days. I used to be able to google "football" on any given day during the 1970 football season and get at least a dozen results. Now I am not getting a single article.

Had the same issue yesterday when trying to link a friend to articles about the Seahawks/Bucs expansion draft. Used to be there, now zero results.
"It was a different game when I played.
When a player made a good play, he didn't jump up and down.
Those kinds of plays were expected."
~ Arnie Weinmeister
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