New searchable Hansard launches

From Canadiana.ca, an announcement about LiPaD, the Linked Parliamentary Data Project: an initiative to annotate and make searchable the complete Hansard of the Canadian Parliament from 1901.

Parliamentary debates have been available here for some time. But it's true that on that site you will find the text you want only if you already know where to look, more or less. A simple Control-F kind of search will not sweep through whole volumes of text for you.

LiPad's "search" box, on the other hand, covers the whole collection. That has its own issues, obviously. Enter a prime minister's name, say, and you get much more than you can use. But there are advanced searching and filtering tools of the usual kind, which should with a little work take you where you want to go.  And if you are doing your own big-data projects, it's fully downloadable in a UTF-8 CSV format.

But what about the pre-1901 Hansards? (History and Hansard didn't start with the twentieth century, hey?)