Google aims to digitize more old newspapers

Search and advertising giant Google Inc. plans to add “millions of pages” of old newspapers to online archives that can be searched.

Mountain View-based Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) already collects and organizes news stories at its Google News web site, but now plans to add archives of regional papers like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which users will be able to see not just as text, but as images of the pages of the newspapers themselves, complete with ads and photographs.

Material from major national papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post has already been put up by those papers themselves, and Google has helped index those files.

One of Google’s partners on the project is the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, a paper that has been publishing for 244 years.

Google joins a growing stampede of efforts to put musty old documents online. Some local businesses, like Octavo in Oakland, have been making searchable, photo-realistic copies of old books like Shakespeare’s sonnets, Isaac Newton’s Opticks or Galileo’sSidereus Nuncius available for nearly a decade.

These versions have photos of pages that can be enlarged enough even to see tiny worm holes in the pages, yet the text visible on the screen can also be searched.