Searching for Prior Art on Google Just Got Better

Google has introduced an early version of the News Archive Search which lets users search newspapers, magazines and other publications back over 300 years, including scads of articles not previously available via the search engine.

The service retrieves links to articles for historical keywords, and sorts them into timelines. Some of the search results link to “pay-per-view” articles, but Google claims it won’t collect the fees. When a snippet of a "pay" article is shown for free on Google, the site then directs users to the sites of the content providers, where they may be charged a fee to see the full story. Newspapers such as the Washington Post, as well as news aggregators, like the Dow Jones’ and Factiva, show up in archive search results, but none of the media companies apparently pays for placement in archive searches.

This will be a useful tool in information gathering, and is potentially huge for future searching.