An online local newspaper archive launched with a €676,000 Google grant has disappeared without explanation.

Archant’s Local Recall project went live in 2020 after the company oversaw the digitisation of Eastern Daily Press archives from as far back as 1870.

The project was set up after securing funding from Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund in 2017, but now appears to have been scrapped by Archant’s new owner Newsquest.

Readers clicking on the link for the Local Recall homepage are now redirected to the homepage of the EDP instead.

The platform, which could be accessed for £5.99 a month, featured millions of articles from the EDP’s print archives and was fully integrated with smart speakers.

Hence users were able to voice commands such as “What happened today in 1934?”, “Tell me the headlines on the Queen’s coronation,” and “Read me an article about the moon landing” to search the archive.

A web page asking for volunteers to sign-up to help copy-edit pages generated automatically by the project remains live, but does not navigate to the site itself.

Meanwhile a Facebook page set up to promote the project has not been updated since May 2022, while its Twitter feed was last updated in January.

HTFP has approached Newsquest, which took over Archant last year, for an explanation of Local Recall’s apparent disappearance.

We have also approached Google to ask whether any stipulations applied to the original grant in terms of how long the project was to remain live, and if so, whether any of the grant money will now have to be repaid.

To date neither Newsquest nor Google have responded to our requests for further information or comment.

However users of the service have shared their annoyance at its disapperance.

Dawn Leeder posted on Twitter: “Is anyone else cross about #Archant withdrawing Local Recall? Have used it regularly since its inception.

“A really useful research tool – and they haven’t replaced it with anything leaving something of a void. And at incredibly short notice.”

The official Twitter account of the Friends of Norfolk Mills group added it was “very disappointed and annoyed” at the platform’s disappearance.

At the time of its launch, Archant’s then chief client officer Lorna Willis said: “The Local Recall project is a fantastic example of how through the innovative use of technology, a whole world of local history from the EDP archives can become available for all to enjoy.

“We are extremely pleased that this special content is now available not just to read but also to hear and question through world leading chat bot technology.”