Why have ancestry bothered to add the London Gazette to their site?

[kiterunner]

I can't see the point of ancestry's latest addition - the London Gazette 1825-1962? :confused: The whole of the London Gazette is available free on its own site, and searchable on there with the exception of a few issues from well before 1825. Ancestry haven't even indexed it, you have to browse. I know ancestry have web searches of various external databases included on their site, but this isn't one of those.

[Merry]

Goodness knows!

I wouldn't want to try and find something in the Gazette without the benefit of a search facility.

I see they also have The Times newspaper, searchable 1788-1833, which again is available elsewhere, but searchable across 200 years.

[tenterfieldjulie]

Is there anywhere you look online for newspapers after the 1970s?

[kiterunner]

I see they also have The Times newspaper, searchable 1788-1833, which again is available elsewhere, but searchable across 200 years.

I think they have had the Times on there for a long time, though, and the other sites with it on aren't free to everyone.

[kiterunner]

Is there anywhere you look online for newspapers after the 1970s?
I think you would have to look on each individual newspaper's website for their own online archives, Julie. Or if your library offers access to recent newspaper archives.

[tenterfieldjulie]

Thank you. Julie

[Phoenix]

Surely it's the one stop shop principle, Kite?

A lot of new researchers don't know any way of researching apart from through Ancestry.

[kiterunner]

But if it isn't indexed on ancestry, surely new researchers are unlikely to find anything in there anyway?

[tenterfieldjulie]

Aah Yes .. but the publicity blurb will say it is on there!!

[kiterunner]

We can only hope that they are planning to index the London Gazette and have just made it available for browsing in the meantime. It can be difficult to find a particular entry using the London Gazette's search and I wouldn't say no to another way of searching (although Google often comes up with London Gazette results anyway.)

[Janet]

Sometimes you can get pretty good results by adding "site:" to your Google search, Julie. For instance try putting
Tenterfield site:nytimes.com
or
Tenterfield site:smh.com.au
into your Google search field and you'll see what I mean. Without having to rely on the New York Times' own search facility or the Sydney Morning Herald's, it returns articles containing the word "Tenterfield." You do have to know the exact name of the website you want to search. Note that there is no space after the colon.

[tenterfieldjulie]

Thanks Janet.

[Glen TK]

Pure marketing hype, many won't know there are alternative ways to access a lot of the content. Ancestry play on that with the "get all this for one subscription", the more they add the better value it appears to be when compared to the alternatives.