Google has said that it will stop its 2006 initiative to digitise hundreds of years of newspaper archives and put them online. However, the digitised versions of millions of pages from over 2,000 newspapers will remain online.
Google said, "We don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing."
Google’s initiative to digitise started with the New York Times and Washington Post in 2006. In two years the search engine company increased the list to include hundreds of newspapers with pages spanning more than 200 years.
Announcing the move, the company said, "We work closely with newspaper partners on a number of initiatives, and as part of the Google News Archives digitisation programme we collaborated to make older newspapers accessible and searchable online."
"These have included publications such as the London Advertiser in 1895, L’Ami du Lecteur at the turn of the century, and the Milwaukee Sentinel from 1910 to 1995. Users can continue to search digitised newspapers at [Archive search], but we don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing."
Another similar project of Google, to scan and digitise books, the Google Books project, remains embroiled in copyright issues.
This March, a US judge rejected Google’s $125m settlement with publishers and authors to let it publish millions of books online. The judge said the deal to create the world’s biggest digital book library would be unfair to authors and could be exploitative as well.
Circuit Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan said the nature of the settlement that included authors automatically unless they opt out of it formally "would simply go too far" in giving it the power to "exploit".
It is believed that Google has already scanned about 12 million books from top libraries in the US. The search engine company has maintained that the efforts were to provide easier access to the world’s knowledge.
In February, Google introduced a payment service for newspaper websites — One Pass.
