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Elephind.com is a search engine that operates much like Google, Bing, and other search engines. The one thing that is different with Elephind is that it searches only historical, digitized newspapers. It enables you to search for free across many newspaper sites simultaneously rather than having to visit each collection’s web site separately.
At this time Elephind has indexed 2,677 newspaper titles containing more than two and a half million editions, ranging from March 1803 up to August 2013. The Elephind search engine has indexed 141,628,238 items from 2,677 newspaper titles. These include such well known sites as Chronicling America (the U.S.’s Library of Congress) and Trove (National Library of Australia), as well as smaller collections like Door County Library in Wisconsin. Many of the smaller newspaper sites are not well known and may be difficult to find with the usual search engines, but they are searchable from Elephind.com. A list of available newspaper collections that have been indexed so far is available at http://goo.gl/VRQN5l.
Additional newspaper collections are added to Elephind’s indexes frequently.
I found that Elephind operates in much the same manner as many other search engines. If you already know how to search for things in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or elsewhere, you already know how to use Elephind. In fact, there are two search methods available on Elephind:
1. When you first visit the site at http://www.elephind.com/,
you are greeted with a very simple search screen containing one data
entry box. You can search for words or phases in much the same way as
you do on Google although not all of Google’s sophisticated Boolean
search terms are available on Elephind. You can find tips for using the
search box at http://goo.gl/3T6JuH.
2. When visiting this same site at http://www.elephind.com/,
you will also see a highlighted link for “Advanced Search.” When you
click on that, a more sophisticated search form appears, allowing you to
narrow the search to any combination of specific newspaper titles,
country, or a range of dates.
I did a search for my own last name between the years 1811 and 1890
in the United States. It returned far too many “hits” for me to search
through; so, I started narrowing the search by specifying first names
and cities or towns of interest. I was soon looking at information of
interest.I was impressed with the clarity of the newspaper pages I was able to view; but, of course, that is under the control of the individual newspaper collection. Elephind does not host the images on its own web site. Instead, it merely links to newspapers found on a wide variety of servers in a number of different countries from around the world.
Elephind.com is a great tool for family historians, genealogists, and researchers to search historic, digitized newspaper archives from around the globe. Will Elephind locate newspaper articles about your ancestors? There is no way to tell in advance. You need to try it for a while to see. It is a free resource, so why not try it to see for yourself?
Elephind may be found at http://www.elephind.com.
Elephind is continuing to add more newspapers, so if at first you can’t find what you’re looking for, check back later. You also might want to add your name to the Elephind mailing list at http://eepurl.com/ndGhb to receive an email message whenever a new collection is added.
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