Old News - Google launches news archive search.
Wednesday, September 6, 2006 at 07:40 
The BBC announced this morning that Google has opened up its news archive to the public.
The web-based tool allows users to explore existing digitized newspaper articles and more recent online content, spanning the last 200 years. (from the BBC online story)
For a history buff like me this is a nice tool to do research. Although some articles require a paid subscription to the (original) media's archive I have found several interesting articles on the history of Belgium.
The oldest news article I found with the keyword "Belgium" is from The Times dating back to October 21, 1789. Even that article is a "history" article covering the story of King Philip II and the "Lowlands".
From a PR point of view this is also interesting; I asked for a historic time-line of articles related to my country and what do you get as a result in the 1990ies time-frame..? The by now famous PR disaster case study of Coca Cola on how not to handle a product recall. That's the power of the web... stories linger on for ever.
One thing though... When I did a search for "public relations" and scrolled down to 1858 I got results... Didn't know the profession was already known by then (under the same name that we use now). But when I looked at one of the stories dating from 1848 it really is an article published in the The Dixon Evening Telegraph on Wednesday, February 18, 1948... Not good to screw up dates in a historic database isn't it ?
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