Google News travels back into historical archives

San Francisco: Google News is getting a sense of the past to balance out its relentless focus on the present.

Google has added the ability to search through more than 200 years of historical newspaper archives alongside the latest contemporary information now available on Google News, it said on Tuesday.

"The goal of the service is to allow users to explore history as it unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, a top Google engineer who helped develop the news archive search.

"Users can see how viewpoints changed over time for events, for ideas and for people," said Acharya, who also built the Google Scholar service for academic researchers.

Archive Search instantly generates a timeline of stories on a particular subject, allowing surfers to target particular dates, or to observe how coverage of an issue has evolved over time. As examples, he cited the 1969 Apollo moon landing or events with long histories such as the Palestinian conflict.

Archival search adds historical and chronological dimensions to Google News, which since it was first launched in 2002, has allowed people to use keywords to search for the latest news from recent weeks in thousands of publications.