CIA World Factbook Archive (1990–2025), searchable and exportable
Details
- External ID
- 47114530
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- CIA World Factbook Archive (1990–2025), searchable and exportable
- Website domain
- fly.dev
- Launched
- Feb. 22, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 496
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9946091644204852
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
A structured archive of CIA World Factbook data spanning 1990–2025. It currently includes: 36 editions 281 entities ~1.06M parsed fields full-text + boolean search country/year comparisons map/trend/ranking analysis views CSV/XLSX/PDF export The goal is to preserve long-horizon public-domain government data and make cross-year analysis practical. Live: https://cia-factbook-archive.fly.dev About/method details: https://cia-factbook-archive.fly.dev/about Data source is the CIA World Factbook (public domain). Not affiliated with the CIA or U.S. Government.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive maps and geospatial visualizations
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- searchable archive of cia world factbook
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The full-text search web application and comparison views are standard, but extracting, parsing, and normalizing 36 years of historical unstructured text and changing schema formats across 281 entities into a unified relational dataset is a demanding data-cleaning task.
What it would actually take: The system requires automated data-cleaning scripts and custom parsers to ingest historical Factbook text dumps, CD-ROM releases, and legacy HTML archives spanning 1990 to 2025. Data must be mapped onto a normalized temporal schema in PostgreSQL with Postgres full-text search or Meilisearch, alongside charting libraries for trend visualization. The primary difficulty is dealing with missing data, changing country borders, and inconsistent section headers over three decades.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: CIA World Factbook (original), archive.org
Concerns raised: Built with AI, quality concerns about accuracy, Data poisoning/reliability issues with LLM-generated content, Mapping/display bugs (Russia Military GDP not showing), Whether archive remains relevant after Wikipedia exists, Used for advertising rather than genuine project
Feature requests: Light mode / non-dark mode option, Better data validation for template/module transclusion
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 39 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #1 of 40 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 113 days after the earliest competitor.
- American Factbook · ph · 2026-09-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Sell to State · ph · 2026-09-21 · 105 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- All 55,256 Slides of the WAR.GOV/UFO Files Searchable and Linkable · hn · 2026-05-10 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Global Data Tracker · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Archive to Film · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- URNAME · ph · 2026-09-21 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- What was the world listening to? Music charts, 20 countries (1940–2025) · hn · 2026-03-10 · 114 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- I indexed the academic papers buried in the DOJ Epstein Files · hn · 2026-02-20 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.