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Comment on Ask HN: What are good genealogy/family history/immigration search engines?parent

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They do OCR when it is feasible.

An impressive number of typewritten documents from World War 2 were OCR'ed.

Volunteers do manual data entry and verification for documents that do not OCR well (called "indexing"): https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/projects

It's probably worth noting that some of those indexing efforts make more harm than good, there's a large chunk of Polish records which were "indexed" by people who clearly have absolutely zero knowledge of Polish, and the results are SIGNIFICANTLY worse than any OCR could have been. Always compare to source material to avoid surprises like that.

That's good to know. Even Google's OCR in English is pretty spotty, so I can just imagine what it does with other languages.

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