It’s sad news. No other Web company except Google would have had the ambition and good intentions to try and do this in the first place; it’s possible that very concept of a grand unified index of the world’s newspapers just died. But  while the project was a success in terms of sheer bulk–according to the Phoenix, Google scanned 60 million pages–it had crippling usability issues. I suspect that many folks who’d find it immensely useful have no clue that it exists–and even if they do, they may find it weirdly difficult to navigate.

Let’s see…

• The News Archive is so buried that it’s almost as if Google is willfully hiding it. It’s not among the seven services listed across the top of Google pages. It isn’t one of the thirteen on the “More” menu. It isn’t even included in the 49 (!!) Google services on the Even More page.
• Google says that News Archive results are sometimes included right in Google.com search results, but I don’t see them even when they’d be profoundly appropriate. Like, for instance, when you search for “man walks on moon.”
• It does sometimes show results from the archive if you do a Google.com search, then click on Timeline. But not always. And there’s no way to jump from this timeline to an archive search.
• Even if you do a search on Google.com such as “pittsburgh gazette archive,” you won’t be sent to the archive’s relevant pages.
• Google News Archive barely benefits from integration with any higher-profile Google services of related purpose. It’s hard to find in Google News (you need to do a search, then click on “Archives”). And there’s no way to do one search and get results from both Google Books and the archive.
• The archive has a timeline feature. But, confusingly, it’s not the same thing as Google News Timeline--another excellent but obscure Google service.
• What it’s got is unpredictable and, sometimes, glitchy. For Computerworld (which it mistakenly calls Computer World), it has twenty issues from 1967, 51 from 1967, 27 from 1969, 50 from 1970, 1 from 1971, nothing from 1972-1975, 1976-1978 more or less in their entirety, several 1994 issues accidentally rolled into one big document, and a few random pages from other issues.
• If you figure out how to get to the Google News Archive homepage, you still can’t pull up a browsable list of specific papers (or any indication at all of which newspapers are included). Even though it exists.
• There’s a page of News Archive Search Help, but it’s out of whack with the service itself. For instance, its carefully annotated screen shot doesn’t look like the screen I get when I do a search. And it says that the Google News homepage has a link to the archive. Nope.

In short, it’s almost as if News Archive was always an orphan, long before Google officially orphaned it. I kinda wonder: if it had been adequately easy to find and use, might it have been a popular service that Google wouldn’t dream of ditching?

Of course, one of the cool things about old news is that it doesn’t change–those sixty million pages that Google has scanned will remain a useful reference tool. I’ll continue to use the archive. Doing so has always been a frustrating experience; now it’ll be a bittersweet one as well.

Fast Flip is based on Google News, and Google says it came up with it to address the fact that browsing through news sites is usually a slow process–not at all like the effortless instant gratification of flipping through a magazine or newspaper. Google has partnered with several dozen news sources–including the BBC, BusinessWeek, the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Beast, Esquire, the New York Times, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, and TechCrunch–to create previews of their stories that live on Fast Flip but which display the first several paragraphs of the article in a form that looks like the originating site. You rifle through these previews by clicking left and right arrows, and the pages zip on and off-screen in high-speed, fluid animation–hence the “Fast Flip” name.

Fast Flip has a Like button that lets you express your approval of stories you like, and Google says that the more you use the service, the smarter it will get about presenting you with stuff you’re likely to be interested in. (It lets you browse in multiple ways–by subject, by provider, and by author.) Oh, and there are mobile versions for iPhone and Android.

It’s quite neat–pretty addictive, actually. But it’s also…kind of odd. For several reasons:

It doesn’t necessarily make browsing for news faster. The flipping interface shows one story at a time in legible form–versus the dozens that plain ol’ Google News puts on one screen–along with thumbnails in which the headlines are tiny and the articles themselves are too tiny to read. Once you click on a preview, you go to the originating site–which is no faster than usual–and getting back to Fast Flip may be kinda cumbersome, especially if you’ve clicked through to a multi-page article.

The previews break some conventions of the Web. They may have what seem to be hyperlinks, and tools like icons for printing the page, but none of this stuff works–the preview is a giant hyperlink to the article on the originating site.

The ads are un-Google-esque. Google is putting ads in Fast Flip and sharing the revenues with its content partners. Unlike classic Google text ads, these are display ads–tall, skinny ones–and while they’re context sensitive, some of the ones I’m seeing so far are a tad on the cheesy side:

It doesn’t always work. Fast Flip doesn’t carry a beta tag, but it’s a Google Labs project, so it’s experimental by definition. I found it a bit quirky–one Slate page was so wide it didn’t fit in the preview, for instance. And this one-line Atlantic blog post doesn’t really need a preview, except that Fast Flip fails to display the embedded video that makes the text make sense:

I don’t mean to be overly nitpicky–Fast Flip is clever, and I hope it sticks around and evolves. If you check it out, let us know what you think.

People searching for news about the music icon after word spread about his condition were met by a cryptic message: “We’re sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”

It may sound as if Google goofed, but on the contrary, its system worked almost flawlessly. The alert was probably automatic, because traffic was at a significantly higher volume than under normal conditions, and many searches were mobile searches. The company caught onto what was really happening approximately 25 minutes later, CNET reported.

Google did not release specific traffic data, but Yahoo received 16.4 million visitors within 24 hours. The fact that both sites remained accessible is laudable; there was no change in performance from my end.

Had there been a major emergency somewhere in the world, the search giants would have remained a useful conduit for people seeking credible information about what was going on. The companies also showed that they could effectively protect their services from an actual attack.

caused when it had to route a lot of traffic through Asia. It said it would work hard to prevent it from happening again. But over on Twitter, lots of folks are reporting that Google News is unavailable–here’s what I saw when I tried to get in:

In recent months it certainly seems like the reliability of Google services has been patchy. But I’m still not sure whether it’s been struggling, or it’s simply that A) Google offers more major services than anyone else; B) many of them are indispensable; C) as the most important Web company, it’s under the biggest magnifying glass.

(Postscript: Google News is back up. At least for me, at least right now.)

Really fast Internet in England.

Your own personal Wi-Fi hotspot.

Yet another OS for netbooks.

Anonymous? You can’t watch Hulu.

Indian hacker’s Facebook-compromising tool.

Windows 7 requires no RAM.

WiGig: Short-range gigabit wireless.

Windows 7: no speed demon?

An aluminum EeePC: pretty swanky!

The Senate vs. Google News.

I want 100-mbps Internet!

Cablevision: 100-mbps for $100.

Microsoft tests Twitter for emergencies.

Survey: iPhones are primarily personal.

Google News comes to you?

Apple’s doing something with chips.

Dell’s touch desktop available stateside.

New Firefox 3.5 beta available.

New HP laptops for business.

How Microsoft should virtualize XP.

GE’s 100-DVD disc technology.

Technologizer stories will appear on the Google News home page and in searches. And here’s a link that takes you to a list of all of our items on Google News, sorted by date,

We’re Google News fans here, so it’s a kick to see Technologizer there. More important, there are millions of other Google News fans in the world, and we’re delighted that at least some of them will discover Technologizer as they browse around the site.

When I was in college, a few years before the Web came along, I spent lots of time in the library reading old newspapers in microform form, and what Google is doing here instantly reminded me of those days. In fact, it looks like Google’s newspaper archive is the somewhat grainy black-and-white photographs of papers I remember cranking through. Except now, you can do full-text searching of a vast repository of ‘em.

Since I wasn’t at TechCrunch, I read Google’s blog post about the news, and found it a tad confusing. It suggested searching for “Americans walk on moon” but didn’t say where to do it, so I just went to Google Web search. The #1 result was for a site run by a Rastafarian conspiracy theorist–which is not only not the result that Google talks about in the blog post, but a rare example of Google’s first result for a significant search being shoddy.

Turns out that you search for the newspapers in Google News Archive. Even knowing that, I’m still a little confused: I searched for “Americans walk on moon” there and got a couple of scanned newspapers and a bunch of for-pay newspaper stories on the first page of results, but not the result from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Google spotlights in its blog result. I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

When I just clicked on the example link in the Google blog post to go directly to the Post-Gazette’s “Americans walk on moon” results, I was impressed: I got the entire paper for July 21st, 1969, in a viewer that let me pan around and zoom in and out:

The Google blog post doesn’t say how many newspapers are in the archive so far, but it looks like it might be relatively few. I tried searches for bill clinton impeached, fdr dies, red sox win world series, enron scandal, space shuttle explodes, bill gates retires, and america invades iraq, and didn’t get any of the scanned newspapers in the results on the first page for any of them. (Google says that it identifies the scanned papers with a “Google News Archive” label–kinda confusing given that you do the searching within something called Google News Archive, which includes results of multiple types.)

Actually, the Google News Archive results in general aren’t uncanny in the way you expect Google results to be uncanny–for instance, the first result for “america invades iraq” is from an issue of The Washington Monthly published months before America did invade.)

Google says that as it adds more papers to the archive, you’ll see links to them show up in ordinary Google Web search results; that’s pretty exciting, since in many cases original newspaper results are as relevant or more so than anything on the Web. So the prospect remains exciting even though today’s news doesn’t seem to involve an immediate transformation of Google News Archive, let along the rest of Google.

Oh, and when you do find scanned newspapers in your results, you can do what I used to spend a lot of time doing back in college–read old comics: