recently rolled out the ability to search for text within the “full text of books” (and documents) in their scanned archives. It’s pretty simple – searching metadata is enabled by default, so to search through “full text” simply select that option in the search bar like so:

After staring at the search box for far too long I thought I’d opt to search for my name – low and behold I found an article from January 2014 published by a local NYC print publication with accompanying PDF that sourced a Creative Commons photo of mine alongside an article about a picnic project a friend of mine was working on at the time:

They clearly did a fair amount of OCR work on all their documents to provide such robust search – and just to prove the point of how good that search is, this is my name, sideways, alongside the image above which allowed this search result to return in the first place:

That’s all-around amazing, and may greatly expand the ability for people to find backup content on the Internet Archive!

Now get searchin’!

[via @textfiles]