Search Historical Newspapers with Elephind.com

Thanks to a tip from Miriam J. Robbins of AnceStories: The Stories of My Ancestors about a dedicated search engine called Elephind.com, for specifically searching a wide range of online, digitized newspaper collections including Trove of the Australian National Library and the Library of Congress's Chronicling America project. This search engine is free and is dedicated to making it possible to search all of the world’s digital newspapers from one place and at one time.

The sites searches over 1,000 newspapers in a variety of repositories. As explained by the website:

With Elephind.com it is now possible to search digital newspaper collections from around the globe in the aggregate. Elephind.com is much like Google, Bing, or other search engines but focused on only historical, digitized newspapers. By clicking on the Elephind.com search result that interests you, you'll go directly to the newspaper collection which hosts that story.

Family historians will find Elephind.com particularly useful. Elephind.com enables them to search across many newspaper collections simultaneously rather than having to visit each collection separately. Many of the smaller newspaper collections are not well known and may be difficult to find with the usual search engines but are searchable from Elephind.com.

Elephind.com is a product of Digital Library Consulting is a New Zealand company which describes itself as follows:

Digital Library Consulting is a team of software engineers and system administrators who are dedicated to making our customers’ digital library projects easy. To do this, we’ve mastered the implementation of Greenstone digital library software, and have created our own software, Veridian, which is highly specialized to display digitized newspapers and other text-based digital collections. We have strong partnerships with digitization service providers with whom we work very closely during the life cycle of your project. 

It is very important that free alternatives begin to develop to the huge online newspaper subscription sites. This is definitely a website to watch.