Newspapers put millions of past Tampa Bay tales online

St. Petersburg, Florida -- Google has launched an effort to scan in old editions of newspapers from around the country. One of the first papers to sign up is the St. Petersburg Times.

The newspapers in the Google News Archive will eventually trace back through more than 100 years of Tampa Bay history, according to Times Research Editor Tim Rozgonyi.

Issues from the St. Petersburg Times, including the old advertisements, will go back to 1901. Issues of the Evening Independent, the afternoon newspaper that merged with the Times in the 1980s, will go back abut 80 years.

Rozgonyi estimates about half of the organization's old newspapers have been scanned into Google's system so far.

To search the Google News Archive, click here. It's a bit tricky to search only the St. Petersburg Times or the Evening Independent, so follow these instructions:

- Use the Advanced Search option (the above link takes you straight to it).

- In the grey area at the top of the page, enter the words you'd like to find. If you're only interested in the date of the paper, skip this step.

- This is crucial: next to "Return results written in", don't select "English". It sounds absurd, but for some reason the search doesn't work when you pick a language. Leave it set to "any language".

- If you're looking for papers published around a certain time, fill in the boxes next to the label "Return results published between". If you're not interested in a particular timeframe, skip this step.

- The most important box to fill in is the one next to "Return results that come from". In that box, type either St. Petersburg Times or Evening Independent -- don't use quotation marks.

- Leave the "Search articles" option selected.

- Then click the "Search Archives" button in the upper-right.

To test whether you've got the settings right, enter a very common term in the grey area at the top, like "house", and enter a wide range of dates. If you click "Search Archives" and come up with nothing, then you should go back and double-check what you've entered.

Not every issue of the newspapers has been scanned in yet, so you'll find gaps in time where there are no search results. If you don't have luck with the Times, try the Evening Independent, and vice versa.

If you find any cool tidbits from the past, tell us about them in the comments section below.