Google seem to be moving into ever more new domains lately. From launching a new browser, adding face recognition to Picasa, indexing more and more information, and launching their own satellite into space to improve image resolution on Google Earth, it would appear Google is starting to look less like the mere search engine they started out as in 1998, and more like The Ministry of Truth.

Nevertheless, whether they’re genuinely serving the public, or planning world domination, or both, Google’s rapid digitization of more and more forms of information is allowing for access to information that would have been unavailable to the public before.

Projects like Google Books, though incomplete so far, put texts of older, out-of-print books online for browsing. Google Earth lets anyone see in-depth images of the globe, watching world events as they unfold, judging for themselves what the truth is, unfiltered by media bias.

The newest project by the rapidly growing information giant is concerned with working in conjunction with newspapers to scan, digitize and publicize their archives. Initially these will be available through Google News archives, but will be eventually available through the papers’ own sites as well.

Not all newspapers are so eager to work with Google though, as they see its news service as a competitor, and will not readily disclose their archives to the Silicon Valley company. The ones that do though, are pretty excited by the prospect, and we must say that so are we. Projects like this hint at the true potential of the internet, in making information free, and bringing people closer together, instead of drifting them apart.