Publishers wary on Google archives

Content providers have given a guarded response to Google’s latest toe in their waters – a news archive search .

Google’s facility searches archived news from various sources including Thomson Gale, Factiva and LexisNexis as well as direct from news organisations such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal .

The archives can be searched for specified events and the results presented in a timeline format.

Content providers Factiva and LexisNexis are treating the service as very much a beta.

They are offering only limited access to their resources and will be monitoring the developing business model. LexisNexis is making available the index of just a subset of its content via LexisNexis AlaCarte .

Claude Green, interim CEO at Factiva , said: “It is a good strategic opportunity to broaden our brand awareness, but more importantly it will enable us to start to promote the value of paid premium content.

“There are a number of different business models at play and we are going to learn something new about working with the big search engines while they get used to paid content.”

In most cases if a user wants to view the content that Google has linked to, they need to subscribe to the publisher’s site.

Green added, “It is very much a beta from our point of view. We are not making all our business news available. We are going to monitor the situation. This is a genuinely fluid situation in terms of the business model that Google is employing.

“It would be a brave person who would forecast how it will turn out.”

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