Visually browsing newspapers in Google News Archive

Google News Archive now lets you visually browse newspapers from several newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, The Sydney Morning Herald, St. Petersburg Times, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Being able to scan through the real digital copy of old newspapers is actually kind of fun -- I find myself looking at the ads and classifieds more than the content though -- some of the things you can find are quite amusing.

I still have a problem with the visual navigation though -- is this type of thing actually useful? It's easy to navigate to a specific date range which is nice, but the thumbnails of newspapers is useless. I can think of several pieces of information that means more to me than an image -- like maybe the number of pages, quality (because I've found a few older ones that are basically illegible), or the headlines.