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Sites that let you dig up the Past

by Mahesh Kukreja on February 20, 2011

Every online search engine has to face the inevitable question: Can it top Google? But I’m going to tell you a few sites which will help you unearth data from the past.

These online search utilities, instead of crawling through current web pages, sift through archived data.

1. Cached Search

The quickest way to dig up dated content on web is using the cached search results on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

To directly search a cached page on Google, just enter cache: www.examplesite.com/examplepage. You’ll be directly taken to cached page of the entered URL. For Bing and Yahoo search, you need to enter the URL as query and select Cached besides the page you want to view as cached.

Web SearchIf these don’t bring up the results you were looking for, try switching to specialized search engines like Exalead and ScrubTheWeb. They work just like regular search engines, but store cached content for much longer (up to seven months).

2. Web Archives

For older content, try Archive.org, they carry snapshots of websites, news print archives and old research papers from early 1996.

The main aim of this resource – according to its founder Brewester Kahle – is to “help people make sense of the world and give accountability to what’s been published before”.

To do this, the archive regularly releases a robot program called Heritrix, which collects data from about 4 billion sites in each crawl. These are then saved “Wayback Machine”.

Looking for music from the seventies, or classics perhaps? Well, the archive is a treasure of over 100,000 individual shows by thousands of bands – including Beatles and Pink Floyd – freely downloadable. The site also contains old-time radio shows and large number of songs recorded from 78 rpm records.

Internet Archive also has a section for space buffs who want to look at images from NASA’s early missions such as Apollo Program at nasaimages.org.

3. Book Search

Two resources – Open Library and Project Gutenberg – catalogue books and even provide access to electronic copies; all free of cost. The free material includes plays and poems of Rabindranath Tagore, The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, the works of William Shakespeare, including classics such as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, etc..

The e-books available on these sites have been released by the authors under Creative Commons License.

Open Library has around 20 million records and Project Gutenberg has over 33,000 free e-books that can be downloaded freely on PC or e-book readers like Kindle, or Apple iDevices.

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Microsoft to let PC users turn off IE

by Mahesh Kukreja on March 10, 2009

A single check box deep in the guts of the next version of Windows is giving Microsoft Corp. watchers a peek at how the software maker plans to keep European antitrust regulators from marring a crucial software launch.

Windows 7, the successor to the much-maligned Vista, isn’t expected to reach consumers until next year, but more than a million people are already testing early versions. A pair of bloggers tinkering with settings stumbled upon one they hadn’t seen before: The ability to “turn off” Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft lost a long-running battle with EU antitrust regulators in 2007 over the way it bundled media player software into the Windows operating system. The dust had barely settled when a similar claim was filed, this time over Internet Explorer’s place inside Windows. Opera Software ASA, a Norwegian competitor, claimed the practice gives Microsoft’s browser an unfair advantage.

In a preliminary decision in January, the EU agreed. Since then, makers of the open-source browser Firefox and Google Inc., which entered the browser market six months ago, have offered to provide more evidence that Microsoft is stifling competition.

In the media player dispute, the EU heavily fined Microsoft and forced it to sell a version of Windows without the offending program installed. This time, Microsoft appears to be offering the check-box solution as a way to head off a similar ending.

The company declined to comment Friday on the connection between the check boxes and the EU’s preliminary decision. But in a recent quarterly filing, it said the European Commission may order PC makers to install multiple browsers on new PCs and force Microsoft to disable parts of its own Internet Explorer if people chose a competing browser.

The check boxes, which were described on Microsoft enthusiast blogs http://www.aeroxp.org and http://www.chris123nt.com, also give Windows 7 users a way to disable the media player and hard-drive search programs, among other components, both of which have drawn scrutiny from regulators.

After Windows Vista landed with a thud, Microsoft needs a hit, said Michael Cherry, an analyst for the research group Directions on Microsoft. Beyond appeasing the EU, he said he didn’t see much use for the Internet Explorer check box.

“Windows 7 is becoming more and more important for Microsoft,” he said in an interview. “You don’t want anything that gives anyone even a doubt as to whether or not they should upgrade.”

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