Friday, December 14, 2012

1MM #4: Search Google News Archives Fast!

There are many ways to search the Google News Archives, but this 1-Minute Morceau shows you probably the fastest way to search archival news.  



I've used this before, but I recently saw a demo of this at a recent "Google Apps For Education" (GAFE) event by Google Certified Teacher Mark Hammons.  (Thanks for the reminder Mark!) Here's Mark's screencast of a similar method.  

Search on! 

10 comments:

  1. Nice videos, but I would suggest ducking your music a little more. The music overpowers your voice a bit.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Dr. Daniel.

    This is great.I didn't knew this trick. Thank you for sharing it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. DrR - sorry to be a pita, but just as a heads up: tried the morceau using my PowerBook running OS X (Tiger 4.11/Safari) and this doesn't seem to work... not a big surprise. Switched to a more up-to-date  - Intel based
    MacBook running OS X 7 (Lion/Safari browser) and it worked fine. Have Chrome installed, but use Safari out of habit & wanted to see if the browser made a difference (you were using Chrome).
    Had a bit of trouble with the video methodology shown by both you and Mr. Hammons - for slightly different reasons: in your example you input [archive] instead of using [specified dates] which adds extra steps once you get the search results & then add the dates. Mr. Hammons uses [specified dates], but then also uses [source] & types in [Google News Archive] - redundant since that is the subject of the search & would only be used to refine/specify actual sources; e.g., the NYT. btw, input doesn't seem to be case sensitive as Mr. Hammons speculates.

    The two take-aways being: 1) run the latest, greatest hardware/software or the results may not be the same. 2) small deviations in methods/techniques may be confusing to the folks you are trying to instruct - the 1 minute morceau seems like 10 seconds with the quick clicks & video edits. If we all were up to speed and clicking along on your wavelength Dan, the morceaus would be superfluous. That said, I'm an appreciative dullard for your efforts to expand GooAwareness, thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I hate to tell you this but in the last week, Google has apparently entirely eliminated their Archives. You cannot search them -- or at least you cannot find much before 1969 -- if that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Interesting... and odd. It's working for me just as shown in the video. I just did an Archive search for [ William Taft ] and got results that were well before 1969. Can you send me a screen shot?

      Delete
  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hate to tell you this but in the 7 days that have passed since you posted this.. Google has apparently eliminated their archives.

    I find I am unable to search them in any way.

    ReplyDelete
  7. In the 7 days since you posted this, your company, Google, has gotten rid of the Archives.

    Go ahead and try to reproduce the results above. I have tried to search and I find nothing older than 1969 -- and even that might be newer articles that get catalogued as old. I saw one from 1969 talking about questions Mitt Romney got in Wisconsin. Not George. Mitt.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Interesting... cuz it works for me, just as shown.

      Can one of you (Chaz or Goalpoint) send me a msg with a screenshot of it NOT working? Let's try to debug this!

      Delete
  8. Sorry about so many posts. It seemed to me that they were not working under AIM so I went to my Company's Google account. Please feel free to delete any of the excess posts you have.

    Anyway... The Archives seem to be back, but still things are not working exactly as in the video but a different way.

    Google is futzing around with this area. For a while there were no articles older than 1969. Now I see some going back to the 1800's.

    So, they are fiddling with things and changing them up. I noticed two Google updates since I posted.

    ReplyDelete