UPSC PYQ Search

Connect with me: LinkedIn • GitHub

A searchable database of UPSC Previous Year Questions created from UPSC PDFs using OCR, PostgreSQL (Supabase), and FastAPI.

🔗 Live: searchupsc.onrender.com

This repository's code is licensed under the MIT License (see LICENSE).

The UPSC question content indexed by this project is sourced from official UPSC previous year question papers and remains the property of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). It is used here strictly for educational, non-commercial purposes to assist aspirants.

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Architecture

UPSC PDF
    ↓
Tesseract OCR
    ↓
Question Extraction & Cleaning
    ↓
CSV Dataset
    ↓
PostgreSQL (Supabase)
    ↓
FastAPI Search Engine
    ↓
Render Deployment

Features

• Keyword-based search across PYQs
• Highlights matching keywords in results
• Fast and lightweight — no JS frameworks

Tech Stack

• Python
• FastAPI
• PostgreSQL (Supabase)
• SQLAlchemy
• Tesseract OCR
• Deployed on Render

Current Dataset

• ~300 searchable questions

• UPSC Prelims 2026 (Paper 1)

• UPSC Prelims 2025 (Paper 1)

• UPSC Prelims 2024 (Paper 1)

Known Issues

• Questions with tables (e.g. match the following) lose their formatting after OCR — they appear as plain text which is hard to read. This needs to be fixed.

Feel free to open an issue or reach out directly on LinkedIn

Future Improvements

• Add older PYQs (2023, 2022, ...)
• Mains questions
• Subject and year filters
• PostgreSQL Full-Text Search (tsvector)
• Semantic search using embeddings
• Similar question discovery
• Better OCR handling for tables

My Story

I spent 8 years preparing for UPSC. During that time I often struggled to search through previous year questions quickly, so I built the tool I always wished existed.

I am currently pursuing Big Data Analytics from CDAC and actively looking for a job opportunity. If you think I can contribute to your team, please reach out.

📩 LinkedIn • GitHub

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Built by someone who walked this road for 8 years.