Got some Google news for you today: First, Google has announced it’s stopping its quest to digitize old newspapers and post them online in the Google News Archive—to the disappointment of genealogists searching the archive for their ancestors’ names. Also, small newspapers lose the Google option for preserving old issues.

Google will continue to support the existing News Archive, so you can still search it. But it won’t add any search enhancements.

This article from the Boston Phoenix has more on what Google’s doing instead.

See other sites where you can search online newspapers in this free FamilyTreeMagazine.com article, and look for even more help using online newspaper databases in our November 2011 issue. (We’ve also got a Family Tree University course on newspaper research.)

In other (happier) Google news, now you can get definitions for words in Google Books right then and there. Just select the word and a little pop-up menu gives you options to define it, translate it, or search for it in the book, Google or Wikipedia. You have to be in “Flowing Text” mode for this to work; click here for more details.