Accessing Historic Newspapers - Which is Better, BNA or FindMyPast?

[Wexflyer]

Given that BNA and FindMyPast are linked, this is an odd question to have to ask.  I have only used the BNA site to access historic newspapers, but some recent comments alerted me to the fact that the BNA and FindMyPast implementations are not the same. There are several major metrics by which their historic newspaper article search facilities may differ:

1). The utility or power of their search engines
I would have assumed they were identical. But I have seen comments that they aren't.
- How do they differ?
- Which is better?

2) Pricing
I bought BNA access as a standalone package and have an Ancestry UK account for DNA matching etc. 
- What pricing options are available for newspaper access through FindMyPast?
- Better deal or not overall?

3) OCR
The optical character recognition (OCR) implementation is really fundamental to the search functionality.
- Is this the same between BNA and FindMyPast?

[Biggles50]

I subscribed to FindMyPast for three months just to extract information that is not available via Ancestry.

FindMyPast gave me Zero newspaper articles that were any use.

A direct BNA account that I had for a month gave me quite a lot of articles, on Father being a witness at a trial, Great Grandfather’s obituary, accidental death of GGGF, Great Grandfather a witness at an inquest and his obituary.

The FindMyPast account gave none of these.

[Andy J2022]

Hi Wex,

I don't use BNA so I can't really help you over the differences/similarities issue. I have a Pro membership on FindMyPast and that gives me access to the complete newspaper collection. The new(ish) search function on FindMyPast allows you to set fairly precise search parameters, and one thing that you might appreciate is that you can set the search to specifically look at Irish sources. That said, the results can be very inaccurate. For example, even if you put "George Bernard Shaw" in apostrophes you would still get lots of results which only had two out of the three names. And you would also get results where Bernard Shaw appeared in one sentence or paragraph, and George Smith appeared in the next and so on. I can't comment on whether the OCR is better or worse than BNA, or indeed how good it is just on FindMyPast, because there doesn't seem to be any way of seeing the results it missed. That said I have found it is pretty accurate even on really poor quality scans.
I find the snippet feature on FindMyPast very useful. This allows you to select just the article or part of it, and download it as a good quality image which has the title and date of publication of the newspaper etc as the file title.

FindMyPast have a pretty good help desk staffed by humans, so you might try asking them about the BNA and FindMyPast question.

[martin hooper]

I don't use BNA, only FindMyPast. I have found hundreds of newspaper articles for people on my tree over the years. In some cases giving clues that break down brick walls. It's the main reason I continue my FindMyPast subscription.

Martin

[AllanUK]

Like Martin, I have great success in searching newspapers on FindMyPast.

In reality, as FindMyPast own British Newspaper Archives site, search results should be the same but you do get differences -- this is all down to the search engine of each site and obviously what / how the user inputs the wording for the search. On the rare occasion when I hit a problem with FindMyPast, I try the BNA in case it comes up, if it does, I note the name and date of the newspaper and then use that info to find it on FindMyPast. At the end of the day it is down to user choice.

[sugarbakers]

I don't use BNA, only FindMyPast. I have found hundreds of newspaper articles for people on my tree over the years. In some cases giving clues that break down brick walls. It's the main reason I continue my FindMyPast subscription.

Fully agree .... I use FindMyPast regularly for info for my website ... I would, however, advise that it takes some time to get used to the new search page; the choices are many, and quite often the more vague you can be the better.

[Gadget]

I've used F M P since it was set up as 1837 online and have subscribed the the Pro sub since it was introduced.  I have used the newspaper section with few problems. It's latest iteration seemed strange at first but I find it fine now.

[GrahamSimons]

In my experience it's worth trying both search engines, even if you only have a subscription to one of them - the search engine will deliver title and date so you can then find the target in the other website.
It may not be well-known - Welsh newspapers are free to search at the National Library of Wales, see https://newspapers.library.wales/

[bugbear]

The search engines have quite different interfaces and facilities.

Their strengths vary. Generally speaking, the BNA interface is more powerful, having phrases, and "do not include" features.

However the FindMyPast interface offers the ability to filter on multiple things at the same time, which the BNA does not. I filter on Norfolk/Suffolk frequently, since my family/ancestors lived on the border. The FindMyPast also has good name wildcarding.

Since BOTH give small text summaries (that can be used as a source of unambiguous text snippets) there is no great difficulty using which ever search engine suits your current target, and then using a snippet in which ever version you have a subscription to see the actual newspaper.