Researchers in Israel say they have developed a computer program that can decipher previously unreadable ancient texts and possibly lead the way to a Google-like search engine for historical documents.

The program uses a pattern recognition algorithm similar to those law enforcement agencies have adopted to identify and compare fingerprints.

But in this case, the program identifies letters, words and even handwriting styles, saving historians and liturgists hours of sitting and studying each manuscript.

By recognizing such patterns, the computer can recreate with high accuracy portions of texts that faded over time or even those written over by later scribes, said Itay Bar-Yosef, one of the researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

“The more texts the program analyses, the smarter and more accurate it gets,” Bar-Yosef said.

The computer works with digital copies of the texts, assigning number values to each pixel of writing depending on how dark it is. It separates the writing from the background and then identifies individual lines, letters and words.

It also analyses the handwriting and writing style, so it can “fill in the blanks” of smeared or faded characters that are otherwise indiscernible, Bar-Yosef said.

Google Inc.’s Gmail service was knocked offline Tuesday in an outage that the company said affected a “majority” of its millions of e-mail users, including consumers who get Gmail for free and businesses that pay for a version for their employees.

The disruption, which lasted under two hours, was a reminder of the growing dependence on Google’s technology. The free version of Gmail is the world’s third most-popular e-mail program with some 149 million users worldwide in June, ranking behind the free e-mail services offered by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., according to data from comScore Inc.

Tuesday’s disruption led tens of millions of Gmail users to get an “Unable to reach Gmail” error message as their computers tried repeatedly to reconnect to the service. Google said it had taken some of Gmail’s servers offline for routine maintenance, and underestimated the load that would place on other computers responsible for directing traffic to the appropriate Gmail servers.

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