Google expands online news index

The news archive to be unveiled Wednesday includes old articles provided by a long list of media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and The Washington Post.

Other leading information storehouses like LexisNexis, Factiva and HighBeam, also have opened up sections of their databases to Google's expanded index.

Until now, Google's 4-year-old news search service has focused primarily on stories posted on the Web during the past 30 days.

The new archives feature will only share excerpts from stories related to users' requests, which are expected to range from seminal moments in history to minutiae about sports and science.

To see the full stories, Google's visitors will be sent to the Web sites that own the content. Those referrals figure to provide media outlets with more opportunities to charge for access to the full stories — a common practice when people want to read historical information.

"This is going to be a very good thing for us," said Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com. "There is a tremendous hunger out there for our archives."