Google Offers Historical News Archives

The San Francisco Chronicle reported today that Google has added a historical news archive search capability, permitting visibility into premium services such as the Washington Post Archives, NewsBank Newspaper Archive, New York Times Archives, and Factiva. This has been a long-awaited development, ever since Yahoo! did similar deals with premium archive services last year. For information industry veterans, these arrangements represent the next step in convergence of the free web and premium databases, bringing virtually all online news content together through a single search box. Combined with the ability to pay for all articles through the new Google Checkout, this will probably be the best way of answering the old question of whether or not individual consumers are willing to pay for articles. Assuming users are willing to trust Google with their credit card information, they are making it about as convenient as possible to find and buy articles online.

Pricing is another issue, however. Considering that one can buy songs or TV shows on iTunes and other services for less than a dollar, and movies for less than $2.00, the average price of $2.95 per article is probably out of whack with what the public is willing to pay. Nevertheless, in the slow-moving publishing world this latest development should be considered a big step. Congratulations to Google on putting resources into negotiating the agreements that made this possible. If they want these deals to really be productive and long-lasting, however, the next step will be for Google’s publisher relations folks to gain the rights to set pricing. They should be able to do this, since once the premium services realize that searchers are no longer a captive audience, they just might see the light and realize they need to allow the market to set pricing, just like it does for any other industry.