There's been a Google product of mine that I *really* love, and that's Google News Archive. It's been a very, very rich source of history for me, as the newspapers that it digitised and allowed you to browse went back quite some way - often back into the late 1800s, or even further back. This is a significant amount of history we're talking about here, and consists of many, many, many accounts of current events of the time. It was an absolute treasure trove of information.

Take, for example, the Columbian Herald. Here's a (low resolution, so that I don't get sued for copyright violations) screenshot of the issue on 28th August 1738: (click the screenshot to get a bigger picture, although not so big that you'll be able to make out the body text - again, that's to prevent any issues on copyright violation)



Now, the newspapers can still be read. For example, this newspaper issue can be seen by going to http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=IEpB_1CIIT4C&dat=17380828&printsec=frontpage&hl=en . (I doubt that this link will be suitable for screenreaders, as the Archive seems to present digitised images rather than text.) And you can still browse the newspapers by clicking "Browse all newspapers" at the top. However, you can't *search* the newspapers any more, and this was by far the Archive's greatest strength. You used to be able to search the Archive and get back not only the articles matched, but also a very nice little bar graph showing the frequency of the search term by date, and you could click on the graph to narrow the search down to a specific time period.

This made it incredibly useful for research or even just killing time. By searching the Archive you could gain an incredibly detailed view of how things were during a specific time period by looking at different newspapers. I spent many an hour buried in the Archive, because it was just so fascinating to me. Archives are a deep personal interest of mine, and suddenly being denied access to searching this one is heartbreaking, and it worries me because who knows if the archive itself will remain accessible?

I really hope Google can reconsider on this one.

[edited 2014-01-09 to fix the URL to the newspaper; apparently news.google.co.uk doesn't work for that URL any more, but news.google.com does.]