Google has decided to scan and digitise a number of historical newspapers, and will make the scanned images of the original newspapers available online.

In a blogpost on its website, Google announced that it is seeking to make old newspapers available once again, and will make them searchable online.

The search leader plans to do this by entering into partnerships with newspaper publishers that will see the digitised versions of millions of pages of newprint come online as part of a mammoth news archive.

The ad-supported effort will see Google digitise pages of news archives, including photos, articles, headlines, and advertisements.

The move marks an expansion of a two-year old initiative by Google to index old newspapers of The New York Times and the Washington Post, and index them in Google's News Archive.

In the blogpost, Google project manager Punit Soni said that users would be able to search these newspapers online, and will also be able to ''browse through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all".

Soni says that globally, there would be billions of pages of newsprint possibly containing every story ever written, and Google's endeavour is a way to ''help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily". He said that the results of the project would be initially available via the Google News Archive site, and over time, as the index grows with the inclusion of more and more article, they would be available through Google's main search results as well. 

Google plans to work with newspapers ranging from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has been published continuously for the last 244 years, thereby making it North America's oldest lasting paper.

The online archive would allow netizens to see how newspapers covered historical events of bygone days. Initial newspaper partners for the digital archiving program are those based in the United States and Canada.

Google already has a similar function available online, called Google Book Search, which is a wide effort in collaboration with academic libraries around the world to scan older, out of print books. Google calls it an effort of ''just getting a lot of published offline content online."