Google Gets That Much Closer to Indexing F-ing Everything

Looks like Google is serious about that whole "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" thing.

The official Google Blog announced today that the company (which, full disclosure, has a connection or two with my employer, the New America Foundation) is "partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives."

That's big. Big for democratizing access to information, which I think is great. Big for newspapers themselves, which might be able to make more by splitting the revenues with Google than by muddling through attempts to monetize their archives alone. Big -- and bad -- for the Westlaws and Nexises (Nexiae?) of the world, which charge a decent chunk of change for combined newspaper archives. And probably big for IP and copyright attorneys, as former stringers, press guilds and others inevitably raise new questions about just who owns the words and pictures on those yellowed old pages and pieces of microfiche.

Most interestingly, though, it's potentially huge for Google -- or more precisely, for Google's reputation.

Over the weekend, John Battelle wrote that Google's recent foray into satellite imagery might be dangerously close to "the company's Waterloo - a viral meme that Google is sensing too much, knows too much, and is too powerful." Somehow, I think that digitizing "billions of pages of newsprint" creeps a heckuva lot closer to that line.

But then again, Google's already done it to the book business...