Google to index 200 years worth of news

I just saw this headline, and it sounds promising. Google is gathering 200 years of world news and indexing it. This should be a GREAT resource for anyone into history, genealogy, or for anyone with a general interest in the past.

Picture this...you want to buy someone a gift but can't think of a thing that they would like. Why not hop onto Google, look up their birth day and year, and put togther some sort of silly nostalgia piece with all of the headlines from the day that they were born?

Even better, type it up in the GIMP or some other app that handles text with grace like Quark Xpress, make up a fake newpaper layout, include a headline about the birthday person being born (aside from all of the other not-as-important events), and print it out on newsprint. Then frame it and wrap it, and you now have a personalized gift for the ungiftable person in your life.

How cool is that?

Only time will tell if the new Google news archive service will be this useful. I did see something about them listing "paid" news reprint services along with the free ones. If that's all it is going to be (mostly paid archives), there are already a bunch of other sites out there doing the same thing and I won't be very impressed.

Of course, nobody else will do it in the scale that Google will...at the least, we'll have one central place to go for old news (aside from my Blog - ha!).