Google has taken another step towards its stated goal of indexing the world’s information by scanning newspaper archives and making them searchable on the internet.

The company that leads the way in cataloguing online information has been stepping up efforts to digitise material created before the advent of the internet. Google Books has been gradually scanning millions of books from publishers and libraries, making the text as easily searchable as that of a website.

The newspaper-scanning project announced today will begin with a handful of North American newspapers, including the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, considered to be the continent’s oldest newspaper.

Large newspapers including The Times and The New York Times have already digitised their archives and opened them to readers, but smaller publications do not have the resources to embark on the labour-intensive process of scanning thousands of editions.

Google’s intention is that billions of articles from the past 250 years will eventually be brought online.

“We’ll be bringing online generations of writers,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products told the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. “We’re adding newspapers to the broader sweep of offline material we’re bringing online.”

Hyderabad: Google has launched “Google Map Maker”, a global product developed by the Indian engineering team, which allows users to add or edit features, such as roads, businesses, parks, schools, apartment buildings and localities.

With Google Map Maker tools, users can add detailed information about these locations and this user-created geographical content is updated and made visible immediately to all other users, a Google statement said on Thursday.

Understanding that people know their neighbourhoods bets, Google Map Maker empowers this user-expertise to improve the breadth and depth of available mapping data. The product introduces peer moderation allowing users to review the data their peers have entered to ensure map quality and accuracy.

“Google Map Maker solves an inherent need especially for countries such as ours where maps data in sparse. This product embodies our passion to empower people everywhere, to share knowledge of the places they know best by creating maps”, Dr Lalitesh Katragadda, software engineer and creator of Google Map Maker said.

“This is a great achievement for our engineering team,” said Dr Prasad Ram, Head of Google R&D.

This launch is the reinforcement of our commitment to bring more useful information to people around the world and especially in hyper-growth countries like India where maps are changing on a daily basis given the rapid pace of infrastructure development”, he added.

MUMBAI: Infotech Enterprises, a global technology solutions provider, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire California based TTM, an embedded software services company, for an unspecified amount.

Infotech Enterprises said it evaluated several opportunities before zeroing in on TTM (Time To Market Inc) to launch its foray into the Hitech industry that has a huge potential.

The combined entity has the capability to provide end to end design services to semiconductor, telecom, and computing industries, the company said in a press note.

Mr BVR Mohan Reddy, CMD, Infotech Enterprises said the company will pursue other organic and inorganic opportunities to address the whole spectrum of the Hitech industry. – PTI