Mike Rivest points out that archives of The Gazette, from 1878 to 1986, are now available for searching on Google News’s newspaper archive.

For those unfamiliar with the archive, it scans countless newspaper pages, subjects them to optical character recognition, and encodes it all in a vast database. From there, you can search for stuff and it’ll take you right to the newspaper page in question, highlighting the appropriate text.

The system isn’t perfect. Some dates are wrong, some newspapers mislabelled. And the text you’re looking for might have gotten garbled up in the OCR machine.

And not every issue is there, so you might get disappointed if you’re looking for a particular issue or article.

But considering the number of requests daily to The Gazette about accessing old newspaper archives, I’m sure this will come in handy to many. (Kristian Gravenor just creamed his pants, for one)

Some quick searching has found me the Habs’ 1986 Stanley Cup win (above), and these two below:

There’s also all 172 pages of the bicentennial edition in 1978.

Le Devoir’s archives are also online, though Google’s newspaper search algorithm seeks out block of what it considers legible text, so what comes out are those bits of English that have been published in the newspaper.

Also available are archives from:

• Le Canadien (1800-1979)
• Gazette des Trois Rivières (1810-1849)
• La Minerve (1820-1929)
• The Quebec Daily Mercury (1860-1909)
• Canadian Illustrated News (1860-1889)
• Le Journal de Trois-Rivières (1860-1889)
• The Montreal Herald (1870-1899)
• The Montreal Daily Witness (1870-1879)
• The Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph (1880-1979)
• La Quotidienne (1880-1939)
• The Montreal Daily Post (1885-1888)
• The Sherbrooke Examiner (1890-1909)
• The Westmount News (1900-1919)
• Le Temps (1900-1964)
• Le Nationaliste (1910-1939)
• The Montreal Daily Mail (1913-1917)
• The Sherbrooke Telegram (1930-1959)
• La Revue de Granby (1940-1959)
• Town of Mount Royal Weekly Post (1940-1991)

Non-Quebec papers include the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen.

Happy hunting. (Just remember, if you’re searching for something significant, that newspapers are yesterday’s news, so you have to search for the day after.)