November 17, 2001, Saturday

Dusting Off the Search Engine

By Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones

In 1913, The New York Times published the first quarterly issue of The Times Index, a painstakingly assembled and cross-referenced guide to virtually every article, name and item that had appeared in the newspaper in the previous three months. The index has long been superseded by computerized databases. As The Times celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, the index is an artifact known mostly to librarians who dust the scores of volumes that still survive on shelves across America.

But in the early decades of the 20th century, it was the index that transformed The Times from a well regarded New York City daily into a national ''paper of record.'' The index made the newspaper a databank; it was the search engine to the mountain of facts published in the paper each year.

The index made its debut amid declarations in The Times of high-mindedness and soaring vision. The truth was more complex. The decision to bear the ferocious expense of the index was rooted in a bitter personal feud between two men: The New York Times's owner and publisher, Adolph S. Ochs, who had acquired the paper in 1896, and a former aide who, Ochs feared, would beat The Times at the rival New York Sun.

Creating a rough index of a newspaper's content was not new. The Times, like other metropolitan dailies, had had one for internal use since its birth in 1851. Ochs's flash of genius was to publish the same information in a more ambitious and professional format and to promote it widely to libraries, colleges and other newspapers. The precomputer index was a pedant's dream. Each dated entry was cross-referenced by subject matter and names, included a brief description of the story, and gave the issue, page and column of The Times in which the article had appeared. Produced quarterly at first, the index eventually appeared in staggering annual issues that sometimes ran to 1,500 pages.

None of this might have happened were it not for William C. Reick, whose name barely appears in the official Times histories.

In 1907, Ochs invited Reick, a former president of The New York Herald, to join The Times as his personal assistant. The younger man soon delighted Ochs by expanding the foreign news service and securing a relationship with Guglielmo Marconi, whose wireless transmission of news by radio would prove invaluable to the paper.

In 1912 the two men had a falling-out and Reick left to head The New York Sun. Ochs was furious -- and fearful. He considered it the ''stupidest mistake'' ever to ignore a competitor. So he decided to outdazzle The Sun with a host of costly additions: ''The Annalist,'' a weekly financial review; ''Current History,'' a monthly magazine of World War I coverage; a rotogravure magazine; and the highly unprofitable New York Times Index. Reick later blamed the index and the cascade of other features for his failure to succeed at The Sun.

Ochs proved right in thinking the index would become invaluable to a select group. In an authorized biography of Ochs that appeared in 1946, he was quoted as saying he wanted The Times to be the source ''to whose files future historians would refer when it became necessary to settle some obscure point.'' Today, should someone wish to know about the legislative elections of Newfoundland in 1913, the index would steer him to the Nov. 4 issue, Page 6, Column 2 and also report that the Conservatives continued in power.

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