| Hi! I wrote the article. First off, I find it disingenuous that you don't mention you work for Google. But, hey! I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that it was a simple oversight. Addressing your comments: 1. Google News Archive is, without question, a dead project. No new material is being added, no new development is being made, and it's unsupported. They removed the News Archive and homepage and redirected it to News. The method Google suggests for web search isn't limited to news articles, making it effectively useless for research. (It shows everything indexed in Google.) You can search for some newspapers in Google Search, but it's impossible to find any date before January 1970, order by date, or filter by publication. You're stuck with post-1970 date filtering for all papers, ordered by relevance.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle.com%2Fnewspape... For reference, these were the options that were available in News Archive Search:
http://www.library.illinois.edu/hpnl/images/newspapers/gna_a... 2. I didn't say Groups was dead. I said it was effectively dead for research purposes, which is true. For example, you can't search or filter by date across groups anymore:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/linux In your example, how would you propose (for example) finding the first mention of Linux on Usenet? You can't, at least in part because the option to order by date is completely broken:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agroups.google.com+a... Not to mention, only a fraction of the total posts are indexed and available in Google Search. For example, changing your query to limit to 1995 only results in 70 posts. There were many more than that being posted monthly in 1995 in comp.os.linux.advocacy alone. 3. It's entirely plausible that Google's library partners are running low on books, though that doesn't explain why the project appears to be completely dormant. As I mentioned, the official blog stopped updating in 2012 and the Twitter account's been dormant since February 2013. It doesn't seem like any book's been added in the last year -- no new books from January 2014 to today:
https://www.google.com/search?q=a&biw=1146&bih=933&source=ln... 4. The 20% time thing is interesting. As a Google engineer, I imagine you'd have a better perspective on that than I would. Former employees have explicitly said that 20% time no longer exists in the way it used to, and current employees, including here on Hacker News, say that it exists but only on top of your existing workload (effectively making it 120% time). I tend to trust them over a PR person, but really, that was a brief aside in my overall article. The fact that a tiny fraction of the former functionality of a service is possible, albeit with an obscure and user-unfriendly method, does not detract from the overall point: Google's current priorities don't appear to be in archiving the past. |
