Google has partnered with several news archiving services as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian to provide users with access to an index of full-text news articles from roughly the last 200 years.

Through a new "News Archive Search" link within Google News, users can now find articles about events, people, places, and ideas, and see how they have been covered, described, minimized, and interpreted. One of the most interesting features of the new service is how it automatically creates a timeline that shows how an event or topic played out over time. Clicking the "timeline" link reorders results in chronological order. "The goal of this service is to allow people to search and explore how history unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, Google distinguished engineer, who played a major role in shepherding the new product.

Both free and fee-based content is included in Archive Search. Search results available for a fee are labeled "pay-per-view" or with a specific price indicated.

The service has debuted with a U.S. English interface, but there's already a lot of non-English content available. The coverage is the deepest in English, but the plan is to expand into other languages fairly soon. 

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