warning against subscribing to NewspaperARCHIVE.com

[Stuart LeVine]

This is the strongest possible warning against subscribing to
NewspaperARCHIVE.com

1. The selection of papers is very limited, and worse, the selection of
years is terrible. Some papers have only 1 or 2 years.

You won't realize this as you have to really search around. All you will
experience is that your search will come back

empty.

2. The customer service is the worst I have ever experienced from a web
site. Seven times I contacted them with a problem.

Twice they responded asking me to explain the problem (which was explained
in my email). Four times they never responded.

Once they responded that the problem was a feature (A search for the name
Tames give a result James, Prival gives Private and

Polivy gives Policy). They never answer their phone. They take you number
and don't return your calls.

3. Here is an example of what most of the returns from a search look like:



ltiiill, nlnst be written in a style and pertain, to PRIVUL'efuritters will
only

d nuirtyr muat-ho nhuied with thn piuun and nni-um- PRIVUL.i Hiu-n-tary

IIANNA- Two tilitinc'fiiriibhfil; VljIMrrii; PRIVUL- ms Jtujf ?15, Velvrt

4. Attempts to request a refund were ignored. Totally.

5. Cancellation requires you to fill in 2 forms online, explaining your
reasons. Then you have to print out another form,

fill in THE EXACT SAME INFORMATION you filled in online and fax it to them.
They warn you that even though you filled

out the online forms, if you fail to send in the fax they will keep charging
you.

Save the aggravation and avoid this site.

sblevine

[Gjest]

The reason that you get the type of results like that is because they
are using an OCR (optical character recognition) software to perform
the search. Many of the old newspapers are quite faded and can't get
a good scan no matter what. The best thing to do is to scan the
newspapers manually. Some things absolutely can't be done by
automatic searches. I'd be grateful just to have access to the
papers. But that's just me.
Bill Cribbs
GenealogyBuff.com
http://www.genealogybuff.com

On 10/27/06, Stuart LeVine <[email protected]> wrote:

This is the strongest possible warning against subscribing to
NewspaperARCHIVE.com

1. The selection of papers is very limited, and worse, the selection of
years is terrible. Some papers have only 1 or 2 years.

You won't realize this as you have to really search around. All you will
experience is that your search will come back

empty.

2. The customer service is the worst I have ever experienced from a web
site. Seven times I contacted them with a problem.

Twice they responded asking me to explain the problem (which was explained
in my email). Four times they never responded.

Once they responded that the problem was a feature (A search for the name
Tames give a result James, Prival gives Private and

Polivy gives Policy). They never answer their phone. They take you number
and don't return your calls.

3. Here is an example of what most of the returns from a search look like:



ltiiill, nlnst be written in a style and pertain, to PRIVUL'efuritters will
only

d nuirtyr muat-ho nhuied with thn piuun and nni-um- PRIVUL.i Hiu-n-tary

IIANNA- Two tilitinc'fiiriibhfil; VljIMrrii; PRIVUL- ms Jtujf ?15, Velvrt

4. Attempts to request a refund were ignored. Totally.

5. Cancellation requires you to fill in 2 forms online, explaining your
reasons. Then you have to print out another form,

fill in THE EXACT SAME INFORMATION you filled in online and fax it to them.
They warn you that even though you filled

out the online forms, if you fail to send in the fax they will keep charging
you.

Save the aggravation and avoid this site.

sblevine



-------------------------------
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--
Bill Cribbs
GenealogyBuff.com
http://www.genealogybuff.com
Fax: 1-832-553-2796

[Denis Beauregard]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:46:33 -0500, [email protected] wrote in
soc.genealogy.computing:

The reason that you get the type of results like that is because they
are using an OCR (optical character recognition) software to perform
the search. Many of the old newspapers are quite faded and can't get
a good scan no matter what. The best thing to do is to scan the
newspapers manually. Some things absolutely can't be done by
automatic searches. I'd be grateful just to have access to the
papers. But that's just me.

ancestry.com has that kind of data and the local genealogical library
is subscribed to it. So, I tried it. I don't know about the quality
of the OCRing, but when they say Beauregard is somewhere in a very
large page you can read only a little square at the time, then it is
very hard to find something.

Just to say that viewing the full page of the paper isn't that useful.
You need a search at the paragraphe level, i.e. something like the
google search (they highlite the words you searched for in the
resulting page). But I must recognize this is probably easier to do
with a book than with a newspaper.


Denis

--
0 Denis Beauregard -
/\/ Les Français d'Amérique - http://www.francogene.com/genealogie-quebec/
|\ French in North America before 1721 - http://www.francogene.com/quebec-genealogy/
/ | Maintenant sur cédérom, début à 1765
oo oo Now on CD-ROM, beginning to 1765