Have you played with Google's News Archive yet?
I spoke about it last week on TMG's genealogy cruise during a lecture on online newspaper resources and it appears that not too many folks are familiar with this resource yet. It does an interesting job of mining "news" sites on the Internet, but defines "news" rather broadly. For instance, a search of "Smolenyak" turns up 99 hits ranging from obituaries to pieces about me speaking on genealogy to a WWI draft registration record available via Ancestry.com.
What's also interesting about this search tool is that it seems to crawl some databases embedded within particular sites -- such as the WWI draft example I just gave. It also tells you which items require payment -- a handy feature.
Yet another aspect I appreciate is that it surfaces foreign articles. Among the 99 Smolenyak offerings were ones in Polish and Italian.
And here's another handy feature -- the timeline. You can set it to timeline mode so that results are clustered into years and then by month. Or you can just use the timeline and publication clusters that are presented in the left-hand column when you do a conventional search in order to narrow your focus. Pretty cool, huh?
The world of online newspaper resources is far broader than most people realize, but it's in a massive state of flux at the moment, so I'm going to keep an eye on this Google News Archive search. I'm hoping it evolves into sort of a master news search. It's not quite there yet, but for those who are unfamiliar with all the newspaper resources scattered around the Internet, this is an easy way to search at least some of them without even knowing what they are -- and for the rest of us, it's yet another intriguing toy to play with!