Searching History

Yesterday Google News unveiled archive search on the official google blog. There's something fairly cool about being able to search the last 200 of so years of news. Unfortunately, many of the articles only give you a preview and a link to buy them, but some of the sources are free, like Time magazine. For example, a search for Arthur Waley gave me a review of part 4 of his 6-part translations of the Tale of Genji. An interesting quote in the article that reveals sentiments of the period is "Translator Waley learned both Japanese and the still more difficult Chinese from native teachers in London." I've never particularly thought of Chinese as being much more or less difficult than Japanese. Another fun quote about Waley is "He has never been east of Suez, and yet he is a recognized authority on literature and art of the Far East." Although, I knew he had never actually been to Japan or China, I still found it amusing.

The archive search gives you nice options for filtering dates and publications, and so I could find several articles about computers from 1889, when 'computer' was a job position for a human. It would be nice to be able to search for 'free publications' and I did find what I assume was an error with the word database showing up in an act supposedly from 1776 (and in the contect of a DNA database no less). ;) The next reference of the word 'database' is 1984 (which is more like it). I sent them a feedback email about it; we'll see if anything happens.