Extra, Extra! Google News Now With Premium Content

(Posted by Jarid Lukin, Director of E-Commerce, Alacra)

Google just launched an "Archive Search" at Google News, and like most Google launches, it is receiving a lot of attention across the blogosphere and in the mainstream media.

One of the new features included in this archive search is the inclusion of premium content from companies like WSJ, Lexis Nexis, Factiva, and of course, Alacra.  Google has been working with its partners to index the full content of these premium reports in order to serve relevant results to its users.  This "deep web" content has been previously inaccessible to search engine crawlers since it was either behind a subscription login or required a credit card to purchase pay-per-view. 

As previously mentioned, Yahoo tried to solve this problem with Yahoo Search Subscriptions, but did not have much success.  The difference here is that many of Google's sources, like the Alacra Store, have premium content available pay-per-view, solving the problem of users needing to have individual subscriptions to each site.  This should give Google News a significant advantage over Yahoo Search Subscriptions, which seemingly hasn't been touched in over a year.

Another important feature that hasn't been mentioned yet is that by working with all of these partners and aggregators, Google News now includes more than just "news".  In addition to our news archives, the Alacra Store is syndicating all of our historical premium credit and investment research, market research, and economic data to Google News, greatly increasing the scope of its business information content.  Therefore, if you're looking for an old transcript of a Netflix conference call or what Moody's was saying about Enron before they went bankrupt, you can now find it on Google.