# How to Search the Internet Archive Without Indexing It

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an entity-oriented search system that enables keyword search on the Internet Archive by linking to live web results from Bing, avoiding the need for indexing archived content and enhancing user experience.

## Contribution

It presents a novel search system that combines live web retrieval with archive linking, improving access and usability of web archives without extensive indexing.

## Key findings

- Effective retrieval of archived web content via live web search integration
- Enhanced user interface with modern search functionalities
- Insights from experiments on web archive search performance

## Abstract

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.