While most people who are using services like Google (News - Alert) are looking for new products and services, there is a use for getting old information as well. We are not talking about who won the Super Bowl 10 years ago, we mean really old. 

Google has recently announced that they have found a way to actually digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls. This particular addition to the Google library could be considered the oldest document on the web or at the very least the oldest document provided by Google.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are considered the oldest known and preserved recordings of biblical texts in the world. While Google is certainly one of the world’s biggest digitizers of text, they are far from the first people to come up with the idea. In fact, Google as well as all of the eBook publishers can thank Michael Hart for the number of print documents that have been digitized. It was his baby, the Gutenberg Project that first showed people just how useful actually digitizing documents like the scrolls could be. 

Of course, if the Dead Sea Scrolls were just copied and put on the web that would not be nearly as cool as what the reality is. By digitizing these documents, they can actually be searched. The Scrolls have been put on the web using super-high resolution 1,200 mega pixel stitched images. 

This process makes the documents easier to read and is why they can be text searched. The Dead Sea Scrolls on the web can now be accessed by going through the library collection arm of the Israel Museum. 

The documents join other important digitized documents on the Google registry such as texts from the British library that date back to the 17th and 18th centuries. One of the prize pieces of the Google digitalization efforts is a hand annotated personal library that belonged to Charles Darwin. 

The process of digitizing is not simply taking a document and putting it through a Xerox, which is one of the reasons getting something like the Dead Sea Scrolls is considered such a coup.