Google puts historical articles online, searchable

Wow, this is nice - and frankly, something I could probably spend hours with. Search Engine Watch tells us that Google will debut a searchable news archive that takes us back through around 200 years worth of news stories. Yes, folks, google is putting the last 200 years of history online. I remember the newsgroups being google-ized was a big deal and that just took us back to the beginnings of the modern internet.... Well, in actuality the articles aren't hosted at google, but at either the content providers or their aggregation services....

Here is one direct link to the archive search, this appears to have as sources: Time, The New York Times, Washington Post, and other major papers. For the most part, the free articles are hosted at the content provider (like Time), and the pay articles are hosted at the agregator service (like ProQuest Archiver.)

It's said that if your Google or Google News search has relevant historical archived news results, then you'll see some of these articles returned in the search results. Currently the service is English only and it appears to be limited to some of the larger publications.... Given my genealogy hobby.... I'd really love to see this done with some of the smaller local papers as well. (Although I want a text transcript and a pdf or png of the original microfilm for context....) Think Google Books for archived news....

Well, it's a start and a good one at that.