Google News used to have an archive search feature. It enabled you to search back through the years for old news stories. This can sometimes be helpful in research (obviously).

A few years ago, Google pulled the plug on it, but now it’s back. Google announced this in the Google News Publishers forum (via Search Engine Roundtable):

Great news–we’ve re-enabled archives search! Our team listened to all your feedback you left here in the forum, and was hard at work to bring you an even better archive experience. From all the posts we received, we heard loud and clear how important these archives are to our users. You can now go digging back in time to 2003. Search on…)

You used to be able to search back much further as Google provided old, scanned newspapers. Now it appears we’ll only be able to search back through just after Google News launched (which was in 2002).

This comes as Google is about to shut down Google News in Spain because of a law that would require it to pay publishers to use snippets of content. Publishers, however, are trying to stop that from happening.

Image via Google