Apparently the Internet Archive’s collections feature (which is 2 years old now) has created a collection for pastebin.com and it is keyword-searchable.

What is the Internet Archive’s “Collections” feature?

The collections feature in general is described as follows by Craig Silverman in his result Substack post (he has a really great substack and honestly, if I had to recommend only one…)

Anyway, he writes “It let’s you perform keyword searches within specific archive collections, including dead news sites such as Gawker as well as in collections dedicated to .gov resources, Telegram, Pastebin and more.”

In an interview with Craig Silverman, the director of the Wayback Machine said the Internet Archive launched Collections roughly two years ago.  Silverman asked him why and how they select content worthy of a Collection:

Apparently the Internet Archive’s collections feature (which is 2 years old now) has created a collection for pastebin.com and it is keyword-searchable.

What is the Internet Archive’s “Collections” feature?

 The collections feature in general is described as follows by Craig Silverman in his result Substack post (he has a really great substack and honestly, if I had to recommend only one…)

Anyway, he writes “It let’s you perform keyword searches within specific archive collections, including dead news sites such as Gawker as well as in collections dedicated to .gov resources, Telegram, Pastebin and more.”

In an interview with Craig Silverman, the director of the Wayback Machine said the Internet Archive launched Collections roughly two years ago.  Silverman asked him why and how they select content worthy of a Collection:

    “Various criteria, including the relative importance, significance or value of the collection to others, with a bias toward news and certain material that may no longer be available via the web.”

“We have tried to index Collections that might be useful to people.”

How to Search Pastebin on the Internet Archive

Go to the homepage https://archive.org/

But instead of searching in the Wayback Machine, find the underutilized general search option below

Type in whatever you want to search. I’ve chose the word “Smith”. A dropdown menu appears with the default “search metadata” checked.

Change it to “Search archived web sites”.

I have long assumed that was just another way of searching the wayback Machine, which does not have a keyword search option, only URLs can be searched. But this is something new where you can do a keyword search

The following appears

You have done a keyword search for various archived websites, but you see there is a collections dropdown menu available, click on it to see the different options to narrow down your search.

By clicking on pastebin.com, I get the following results: