In one of my recent personal projects, I ventured into the vast archives of The Saturday Evening Post, a magazine that has captured American life since 1821. What started as a nostalgic dive into the past tu,/rned into a technical quest to make over a century of magazine issues searchable and accessible online.

Utilizing a blend of OCR with Tesseract and search mechanisms based on Apache Solr, OpenAI embeddings, FAISS, ML Re-ranking, I managed to create a searchable database of the magazine’s rich content from 1900 till our days. From Norman Rockwell’s iconic illustrations to pivotal historical articles, every page was digitized and ready to be explored.

This project engagingly occupied several weekends and further deepened my expertise in search technology. Dive into the article to see how vector search and traditional keyword search can be used to bring the past into the digital age.