The Internet Archive (home of the great Wayback Machine) have just launched the beta of their new service, Recall. What’s so special about this, you may ask? Well, think of it like Google, but where you are no longer restricted to searching current content. Drawing up the billions of pages stored in the Internet Archive, you can now perform a full text search across all this information. The archive contains content as far back as 1996, providing some very interesting snapshots of Internet history (early eBay, anyone?)
Very cool stuff. For those of you interested in the underlying technology behind Recall, check out Anna Paterson’s slides. It looks like they still have a few bugs to iron out, but this should prove to be a very useful research tool.
New beta full text search of Wayback Machine archives now available
Full text searches on information in the past (since 1996) from the Wayback Machine