SNEWPapers
Hello HN, over the past 7 months I've spent nearly 3,000 hours on building SNEWPAPERS, the first historical newpaper archive with full-text extractions, nearly perfect OCR, a vast categorization taxonomy and of course with semantic and agentic search capabilities. Problem: I wanted to search through newspaper archives, but when I tried every service only lets you search for keywords and dates, and gives you back raw images of the papers, and too many of them with no context. A sea of noise. Solution: I taught machines how to read the newspapers and so far I've extracted the content from >…
SNEWPapers launched on April 27, 2026 with 126 votes, #280 of 21,248 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
SNEWPAPERS is a historical newspaper archive covering publications from the 1730s to 1960s, containing full-text extractions from over 600,000 pages with advanced optical character recognition. It is designed for researchers and historians who want to search historical newspapers by content and meaning rather than just keywords and dates. The archive uses semantic search and includes categorization to help users find relevant articles with context, addressing the problem of searching through raw newspaper images without structured information.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
I taught machines to read newspapers, gave them 250 years of data, extracted everything (6 million+ stories so far), separated the ads from the content, and categorized it all. You can search semantically or with you own AI research assistant and get the actual articles with full text extraction, as well as build and share collections. As far as I know, this has never been done before, the data isn't on Google or in any LLM, only on SNEWPAPERS
Search 250 years of American newspapers with AI-powered semantic search. Explore millions of historical articles spanning the 1730s to the 1960s.
6 million stories — and growing daily — are waiting for you to explore. Extracted and organized by our AI from 250 years of American History. Search by meaning, not just keywords. Find articles about concepts, events, and themes — even when the exact words don’t appear. Slice and dice using 24 category and 1,000+ sub-category, state and date filters to find what you’re looking for. Build curated collections, explore public collections from other researchers, and discover connections across centuries of history. Your AI research assistant. Ask questions, get answers with citations, and let it dig through the archive so you don’t have to. Every day, a…from snewpapers.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello HN, over the past 7 months I've spent nearly 3,000 hours on building SNEWPAPERS, the first historical newpaper archive with full-text extractions, nearly perfect OCR, a vast categorization taxonomy and of course with semantic and agentic search capabilities. Problem: I wanted to search through newspaper…
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