All the TV News Since 2009, on one website

Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, wants to gather every newsbulletin produced in the US since 2009 and make it available for free on the service, NY Times reports.

The archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news.

The latest ambitious effort by the archive, which has already digitized millions of books and tried to collect everything published on every Web page for the last 15 years (that adds up to more than 150 billion Web pages), is intended not only for researchers,but also for average citizens who make up some of the site’s estimated two million visitors each day.  

Many conventional news outlets will be available, including CNN, Fox News, NBC News, PBS, and every purveyor of eyewitness news on local television stations.

The Internet Archive has been quietly recording the news material from all these outlets, which will be available, for free, to those willing to dive into the archive. Kahle said the method for the search for information would be the closed-captioned words that have accompanied the news programs. The user simply plugs in the words of the search, along with some kind of time frame, and matches of news clips will appear.

Kahle predicted there would often be hundreds of matches, but he said the system had an interface that would make it easy to browse quickly through 30-second clips in search of the right one.