Google has enhanced its historical newspaper initiative by buying 20 million digitized historical newspaper pages from Canadian company PaperofRecord. The purchase price wasn't available.

The pages—some dating back to the 1700s—will be part of the Google News Archive Search, launched in early September “to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online.”

My search came up with a few interesting early-1900s stories on Haddads (none related, that I know of) in newspapers and books. I found the timeline search more useful—it was easier to pick out results from the era of interest.

PaperofRecord has digitized newspapers from Canada, the United States, Mexico and Europe.

According to the Ottawa Business Journal, the purchase—the end of a two-year agreement between the companies—will "essentially shut down" PaperofRecord. Its troubles started when companies such as ProQuest began paying newspapers to digitize pages—the opposite of what PaperofRecord was doing.

In another month or so, PaperofRecord's online database will redirect to Google.