Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine

This is the basic search bar, as it appears on archive.org's front page, along with icons representing various Internet Archive media types.

Clicking on any of the icons will lead you to a collection page containing items of that particular media type.

If you click on the Search bar, it will expand to show an additional menu where you can select a specific search type:

• Search metadata (not full-text): this will search all items (except websites) uploaded to archive.org, but will only look for your search terms in metadata records. Metadata records usually include the title, publication date, description, subject tags, and other information submitted by the person/organization who uploaded the item; however, their completeness and reliability can vary wildly depending on the original uploader.
• Search text contents (full-text): this is a full-text search that will look within the contents of all text items in Internet Archive, but it will not search metadata records. It also will not find text content embedded in other types of items - for example, closed captions in videos, or text within images - nor can it effectively search handwritten texts.
• Search TV news captions: this option searches closed caption content only for videos in the TV News Archive, a specialized collection of television news broadcasts that includes the Trump Archive and US Congress archives.
• Searched archived websites: this option searches for your keywords within the Archive's collection of over 400 billion web pages. Useful if you do not know the specific URL for a site you want to find in the Wayback Machine. It does not search items uploaded to archive.org.

On interior pages the same search box appears in the banner, at the top right of the page.

When you click on this search box, a menu for selecting a search type appears, just like on the front page.

Due to the sheer size of Internet Archive, searching all content via the basic search can lead to an overwhelming number of results; searching within collections can help make your searches more accurate.

All items in the Archive are organized into one or more collections or sub-collections. Collections are used in many ways. In addition to thematic collections, generic collections exist for every media type; there is a "texts" collection, an "audio" collection, and so on. Likewise, every user has a collection containing items they have uploaded, as well as a collection of favorite items.

To search within a collection, use the search box on the left side of the page, above the list of filters. This area is highlighted with a red box in the image here.

• Enter your search terms into the text area and press [enter].
• On mobile devices, there will be a "submit" icon to the right of the text box, shaped like a magnifying glass.
• Searching inside a collection is the same as the basic search described above, except that there are only two types of search available: metadata and full-text ("text contents").
• Using the checkboxes on the left side of the collection page, you can filter the collection by various facets - such as media type, date, or subject terms. These filters can be applied before or after you submit your search.

You can instruct the search engine to look within a specific date range by adding a bit of simple code to your query.

The basic format is date:[start_date TO end_date].

This can come before or after your search terms, but must observe a few rules:

• Start and end dates are formatted as YYYY, YYYY-MM, or YYYY-MM-DD. Full and partial dates can be combined.
• The date range must be enclosed in square brackets [like this] and come immediately after "date:" with no space between.
• "TO" must be capitalized.
• Combine with other terms using a boolean operator such as "AND", "OR", or "NOT" (in all caps)

Some examples:

• date:[1700 TO 1800]
• date:[1958-01-01 TO 1958-05]
• "middlebury campus" AND date:[1958 TO 1959-06-01]
• date:[1900 TO 1999] AND manuscripts
• date:[1914-07-28 TO 1918-11-11] OR date:[1939-09-01 TO 1945-09-02]

Internet Archive offers a powerful tool that is unavailable to users of almost any other search engines or digital repository platforms: instead of just seeing a list of search results in your web browser, search results can be returned as a downloadable, structured data file in XML, JSON, CSV, and more!

You can also specify exactly which metadata attributes you would like included in your results - from just a title to nearly complete descriptive, technical, and preservation metadata records.

1. Go to the Internet Archive advanced search page.
2. Scroll down to the section titled Advanced Search returning JSON, XML, and more.
3. Enter a search query
   • Examples of advanced search queries and special operators can be found by scrolling further down the page.
4. Select which metadata you would like to include in your data set using the list of "fields to return".
   • You can select multiple items by holding [CTRL] while clicking on them.
5. Enter a maximum number of results to return. The default value is 50.
6. Use the radio buttons to select a format for your search results.