WayBack Machine Adds Keyword Search

Here is something that is bound to upset publishers who are now charging for archival access to their Web pages: The WayBack Machine search engine at Brewster Kahle‘s Internet Archives project has added keyword search capabilities. This makes it much more articulate in searching the terabytes of Web page content that it’s cached during the past half decade.

For examples, How about finding Speigel Online’s September 13, 2001 story about September 11, 2001 terrorist Mohammaed Atta? Or the home page of NYTimes.com on September 12, 2001? Easy.

Some publishers who now charge for archival content were careful back then to put search robot exclusion tags onto their story Web pages. But not many did.