Google Inc has stepped up efforts to digitize dozens of historical newspapers and make scanned images of the original papers available online, the internet search leader said on Monday.

In a blog post on the Silicon Valley-based company’s website, Google said it is looking to make old newspapers searchable online by partenering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.

The effort involves the archieves of dozens of newspaper titles and expands on a two year old effort by Google to work on a two major US newspapers – The Newyork Times and Washington Post – to index old papers in Google News Archive.

“Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you’ll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed – photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all”.

The additional newspapers allow readers to see how newspapers of bygone days covered historical events. For example, the Pittsburg Post-Gazette’s coverage of Neil Armstrong’s (and Edwin Aldrin’s) 1969 moon walk can be found at http://tinyurl.com/man-on-the-moon/

“Not every search will trigger this new content, but you can start by trying queries like ( Nixon space shuttle) or (Titanic located). Stories we’ve scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already- digitized material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators. Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well”.