
Ask HN: How to search for old dated news articles? - symbolepro
I searched on google, but google shows up for only about last 5 years articles.
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PaulHoule
There is a real "ahistorical turn" where people do not read about the past.
And if there is a lesson of history, it is that people do not learn from
history.

Unfortunately there is an "event horizon" in that text after 1970-something
was born digital (most newspapers starting using word processors in that
decade) but earlier text has to be digitized at great cost.

For instance I roll my eyes at the A.I. safety discussions today that are
ignorant of the similar discussions circa 1970, especially the inane "double-
exponential" idea.

Also, Enron was preceeded by

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_Funding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_Funding)

in which somebody programmed a 360 to generate hundreds of thousands of fake
life insurance policies.

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Top19
+1 on this, would also like to know.

I would in general like to say that being a researcher in our society is such
an underrated skill. Knowing how to do legal research for instance is an
incredibly important skill. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in the
United States when he died in 1877, was wealthy because he overheard of the
Gibbons v Ogden case which made certain monopolies illegal and allowed him to
build his canal empire. Jeff Bezos learning about Quill Corp v North Dakota in
1992 and it’s implications for internet sales tax was one of the drivers for
him starting Amazon.com.

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oldsklgdfth
The internet archive is a good resource. I had a professor that researched web
archiving. Basically the internet is dynamic and constantly changing. Sites
come and go. The same is true for news articles.

The example he used was hurricane Katrina. There was a flood of stories
unfolding during the event. But most of them have been removed and
consolidated general information article. The resolution of the event is lost.

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sova
Depending on what era you are looking for, your local city library or
university libraries will have lots of newspaper articles and age-old journal
publications on microfiche.

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toomuchtodo
+1. Your local librarian also is enormously useful for this sort of search.

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sova
Librarians are a largely untapped resource, it's true!

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shoovi
Have you tried searching for digitized news articles via google books?

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symbolepro
Yes, I tried searching on google books. For e.g. I searched for "world war 1"
but I did not get any book or news articles from that period (1914-1918). The
oldest was from 1970 around. And most of them are from >2000 period.

