I was under the impression that it had been shut down.

They announced in 2011 that they would no longer add new content to the archive (the last new addition had been in 2009), which I took as indicating a future phase-out: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385664,00.asp

Then in 2013 they removed the archive-search functionality from Google News (these newspapers used to come up in Google News if you chose "archive" or an old enough date range). The direct URL to the archive search also stopped working a bit after that; if you go to http://news.google.com/archivesearch you now just get redirected to the main Google News homepage.

I assumed that was the completion of the phase-out, and that it was no longer available. Didn't know about the new URL. Cool that it's still online. I hope they plan to restart/reintegrate the project at some point, but at least leaving it in a frozen-but-accessible state is still useful.

5 years of free access to a massive archive of high quality newspaper scans (with decent OCR and a search)? What bastards!

Google may shut it down, but it won't throw away the data. Nobody would do this.

Talk to the Archive Team about that...

Is there a way to download all of it?

I'd like to know this too. I can't find a way. Maybe I'll right a script to scrape it.

Oh god, shut up already. You start the service and keep it going indefinitely then.

Here is he folks. I was just about to open a book on how long before the kneejerk google shutdown guy arrived.