In years of PC game experience the one thing that would stop me from buying a game that I had "trialled" is the feeling that the game is not worth the money. How many times do we look forward to a game, then spend an often not insubstantial amount of money on a game (for some PC owners this may include an upgrade of sorts too) to find that the game is all 'style over substance' and has a life-span of a single play through that maybe lasts a couple of days. Some games I've seen barely had 15 hours of storyline in them, maybe the way forward is between no DRM and pay to update content... I can't say I'm an expert on what is the way forward, but I know what puts me off.

Perhaps I should have been more specific and said "Published for free" Sadly LexisNexis is also chargeable & you need more than one subscription for everything.
Paper archives are normally free to search.
Additionally the news site states it only dates back as far as 1986, many newspapers have even less historical archive than that included, and some do not appear on their list of publications at all. It goes a little way to making available past hundred years or so of print journalism, but it's really only scratching the surface.

If ALL publications were archived online to allow for searching through the web it would make comparative research so much easier. The trustworthyness of sources will be exactly the same as they are now, it's just at pesent you have to physically go to a library archive & scan through paper or microfische copies of the pages, this is time consuming & also has the potential that a researcher will miss information. Even if the immense amount of information (& the huge storage upgrade needed to hold it) contained in the past hundred years or so of print journalism becomes available online it's not so much the content as the search queries that are important. It's amazing how many people are unable to find things on the web even now because they are unable to build a decent search query.