How to Search the Internet Archive Without Indexing It
This provides a user-friendly tool for researchers and the public to access cultural heritage in web archives, though it is incremental as it builds on existing search engines and archive tools.
The paper tackles the challenge of searching large-scale web archives like the Internet Archive without indexing them, by proposing an entity-oriented search system that uses Bing to retrieve current web results and links them to archived versions, enabling keyword search with modern features.
Significant parts of cultural heritage are produced on the web during the last decades. While easy accessibility to the current web is a good baseline, optimal access to the past web faces several challenges. This includes dealing with large-scale web archive collections and lacking of usage logs that contain implicit human feedback most relevant for today's web search. In this paper, we propose an entity-oriented search system to support retrieval and analytics on the Internet Archive. We use Bing to retrieve a ranked list of results from the current web. In addition, we link retrieved results to the WayBack Machine; thus allowing keyword search on the Internet Archive without processing and indexing its raw archived content. Our search system complements existing web archive search tools through a user-friendly interface, which comes close to the functionalities of modern web search engines (e.g., keyword search, query auto-completion and related query suggestion), and provides a great benefit of taking user feedback on the current web into account also for web archive search. Through extensive experiments, we conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses in order to provide insights that enable further research on and practical applications of web archives.