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Facebook has begun surfacing widely "liked" news stories from independent media organizations in its basic search bar today, it appears. First reported by watchdog blog AllFacebook, the change is something that seems likely to be understood as a challenge to Google. It's early days for the feature, but something to watch for sure.

Search for a phrase that's appearing in the news in the main Facebook search box and you'll see off-site links to news stories. "It's an interesting extension of what they did before in terms of off-site links," Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand told us by phone today. "It's not clear how exactly these stories are being chosen and it clearly needs more work. It could work like Google's Social Search, displaying items shared by your friends, but this remains something to watch and see rather than 'oh the revolution is here.'"

Google just announced an interesting update to its Google News Archive, which, starting today, will not only feature the electronic text of a lot more historical newspapers, but also a scanned copy of the actual paper. While having access to the text itself is already great for researchers, having access to an article in the context of the whole paper is even more useful. For now, however, only a select group of newspapers are available in this form and a lot of the historical material is still stuck behind pay walls.