The year was 1983. Shoulder pads, Transformers, and breakfast cereals were all the rage. While dreaming of at least two out of these three, I happened to view a TV commercial for the latter.

"Mom: Eat your cereal, Johnny!"

"But Mom, it lost its crunch!"

(LATER)

"How's your cereal, Johnny?"

"Mmm! It stayed crunchy!"

The cereal in question was Post Honey Nut Crunch Raisin Bran, a peculiar combination of other cereal names that made it more of a mouthful to say than to eat. It was probably for this reason that Post abandoned the cereal less than a year later, after the initial round of commercials had long since drifted off the airwaves.

This presented a problem when my 11 year-old self tried to convince my family that this cereal actually existed.

The TV commercials were long gone, and back then nobody was archiving them in any format. The cereal boxes themselves were off the shelves, and may never have even made it to the shelves in my market. How on earth was I going to convince my mother and sister that such a crazily-named cereal actually existed? They thought I was just making it up to be silly and to fool them, and without any evidence on my side, it was hard to make the case that I wasn't.

Flash-forward 27 years later.

On a complete whim, I decided to try and search for this long-lost cereal on the Internet. YouTube hadn't archived any of the commercials. The breakfast cereal page on Wikipedia steadfastly denied that such a cereal existed. Just when I thought Google was about to fail me, I came across this:

It was an archived copy of a local newspaper, circa 1983, and an article written by Martin Sloan, a bored consumer beat reporter, about the existence of coupons for Post Honey Nut Crunch Raisin Bran. While the image was a scan of the newspaper, the textual contents were fully indexed, allowing me to jump directly to the relevant snippet. You can view it here yourself just by clicking this link:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19830831&id=dfILAAAAIBAJ&s...

If this doesn't blow your mind, think about more than just breakfast cereal for a moment.

If, as this odd case seems to confirm, Google is scanning and full-text indexing the contents of every newspaper ever written, the potential of this for information retrieval is incredible. While most newspaper stories are filler and nonsense (like my breakfast cereal coupon article), they remain the standard archive for daily human events for the last two hundred years.

Before, if you wanted to read something from an old newspaper, you had to trek to a library and hope that they had a copy archived on microfiche, then painstakingly search for the right issue and page. Searching was impossible. So all this knowledge just ended up stuck on tiny bits of film, hidden away from the reach of all but the most incredibly patient of researchers.

Google may piss me off with their AdSense and AdWords rackets, but the fact that they are engaging in this deep a level of information archiving makes it hard for me to do anything but love them. The human race can only be boosted by easy access to our entire history, not just for silly things like Honey Nut Crunch Raisin Bran, but for important things, and everything in between.

Maybe I should send them a Valentine.