This little gem was located when searching Newspapers.com, but it can happen on any site that performs OCR searches. The word was in the hair.

A search for “mimka” on Newspapers.com located a “reference” in the hair of a photograph of a man that appeared in a 1966 issue of The Des Moines Register. After all, that was where the yellow box appeared, so that’s where the word is. I did not look at the actual photograph up close to determine if there was any actual word contained in the man’s hair.

Just a funny reminder that OCR searches are not perfect, just like any automated search. Optical character recognition has its limitations. It is well worth remembering that the option to OCR searches is to manually search every page of the newspaper.

And that is simply not an option for most of us.

Note: This image was posted to Genealogy Tip of the Day on Facebook on 25 October, but I thought it worth sharing with readers here as well.