Show HN: CIA World Factbook Archive (1990–2025), searchable and exportable
cia-factbook-archive.fly.devA 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. Site loads very slowly for me. Tried various devices and networks. Same for a friend of mine overseas. Will scale the website 2025-2026 is available (to purchase/read outside or ur site) and the last version 2026-2027 is planed for release on April 7th, https://www.amazon.com/CIA-World-Factbook-2026-2027-ebook/dp.... Will add to this once it's out. Thanks for sending this :) Any way to download them all at once? Hey there, will add the feature. Wasn't sure if people's computers could handle it all in one, lol, but will make it available in the data export page. I like the timeline feature. Maybe I need to spend more time, but to see political changes / borders / etc. would all be great! Keep up the good work. What is its copyright status? The data from the CIA World Factbook is in the public domain (being a U.S. Government work) and is free for anyone to use. The ETL scripts and data tools available in the GitHub repository are open source and licensed under the MIT License. However, the web application itself is proprietary software, with all rights reserved. Nice! One thing; you're supposed to write "Cannot confirm or deny my affiliation with the CIA" [delayed] Thanks, I will change it! Hmm. It's kind of weird, because I think I actually used it in the 1990s, probably shortly before Wikipedia emerged. Ever since Wikipedia, I don't think I used the CIA world Factbook much at all, so in a way I guess this partly explains why the website is now defunct. But I am a tiny bit sad that it is gone, if only for a piece of nostalgia from the 1990s era. I think we need to be careful - yes, wikipedia has that information, but we kind of lose websites here. That is a potential danger, because we end up with more and more of a monopoly which is rarely good (ok, wikipedia may be an exception but it also has intrinsic quality issues; it is still excellent in many ways but not perfect, and we may get tunnel vision the more websites vanish - just look at the AI slop autogenerated "content" or "affiliate" links you see in a google search, if anyone is still using that). Glad I was able to get the original fact book data that other archivists have gathered over the years- Project Gutenberg (plain text), Wayback Machine (HTML zips and factbook.jsons, and one from the agency's websites Hurray! I didnt discover this until I saw the recent post about its deactivation.