Search Engine
One box over every collection on this site. Until now each archive had its own search and you had to know which one to open. This asks all of them at once and shows you what each found.
What is being searched
Websites, catalogues and directories — 112,593 records. The Early Internet Directory and the catalogues merged into it: the Lycos crawler index of October 1995, the printed Yellow Pages and WWW directories of 1994–96, the Arabic web of 2003, the 1994 list of anonymous FTP archives, hosts named in Usenet posts, the 1994 Internet White Pages, BBS welcome screens, the Major BBS installations of 1994, the GeoCities neighbourhoods and the pre-web software archives. A site that appears in several catalogues is one result here, with every catalogue's description folded into it — 69,676 records were merged this way rather than repeated.
Usenet — 443,652 articles. The NetNews archive, searchable by word and phrase across every group preserved here.
FidoNet — 305,077 messages across 139 echoes, searchable by text or by who wrote them.
How to search it
- Several words finds records containing all of them.
- "in quotes" finds that exact phrase.
- amiga OR atari and modem NOT cable work as written.
- NEAR(dead sea) finds the two words close together.
- Choose search by author to look someone up by name in the FidoNet messages and the 1994 White Pages. The Usenet archive has no author index and will say so rather than pretend it found nothing.
Where a result opens
A catalogued site opens on its page in the Early Internet Directory where it has one — a plain page with the description and the screenshot. Everything else opens inside GE-OS 98, in the simulated Internet Explorer that knows how to reach the captures, the Usenet archive and the FidoNet echoes. The addresses printed under each result are the ones the record itself carries; nearly all of them have been gone for thirty years, which is the point of keeping them.
