You Thought A Three Billion Page Search Engine Was Big? Phooey.

The Internet Archive ( http://web.archive.org ) now has the ability to do keyword searches. The new feature, currently in beta, offers the ability to search a portion of the "Wayback" archive database (about eleven billion pages.)

The search is available from the front page; go to http://www.archive.org/web/web.php and look for the Recall text query box. You can search by basic keyword, or use the advanced search to limit your searches by date (from mid 1996 to now.)

Here's a fun search -- do a time-delimited search for searches like "cool site" and "new on the Internet." The results look like standard search engine results except for the graphs at the top of the page which show the percentage of returned pages mentioning your term by date, and the peak of frequency mentioned.

The search isn't perfect. Sometimes you'll get screwy search results and even an innocuous search can make you painfully aware that this search is not at all filterered. But there's a lot of great old nostalgia here. I'd love the feature to be able to search by domain -- to be able to search different iterations of Yahoo for different keywords, for example.

Posted to Internet-Archives