Finding results from old SE indexes for research project

[bouncybunny]

I had no idea where to post this, so here goes...

I am doing a university research project about a topic which is quite new (I doubt it would have been heard of ten years ago, for example). I want to try and trace the awareness of this topic in the online media and it would be great to be able to go back a few years at a time and see the search engine results for certain keywords at different time periods.

Basically, a bit like when Google did their Search 2001 index thing - [google.com...] - which is no longer available.

(Obviously, I can search by article year, but it's not the same as seeing results from an old index).

Does anyone have any idea how I might be able to approach this? Initially, I only want to do some casual research, to get an idea of the development of this topic?

Thanks.

[engine]

I would have thought that carefully chosen keywords, and Google News archive would give you good pointers. In any case, careful kw choice should work in general search indexes. Use advanced search.
[archive.org...]

Try waybackmachine, although you'll need to know what site you're researching. Not all allowed archiving so you may find it a bit thin for content.

I've always thought that there should be a better way of searching by date.

[bouncybunny]

Thanks Engine. I think that I may have not explained myself properly.

I really need to try and get a picture of the growing trend of usage of a couple of specific phrases over the past ten years. As such, some way of seeing a 'snapshot' of SERPs from specific years, is what I am after. E.G. something like: in 2001 the phrase "red widgets" appeared 25000 times, in 2005 it appeared 35000 times and so on...

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, the Google News Archive appears to be somewhat broken - for my purposes, at least (even a common phrase like "red tomatoes" returns only 12 results for 2001-2002).


I may be asking too much.

I tried archive.org on Google but, of course, it didn't work.

[topr8]

maybe you could look at it from another direction...

see how many domains related to the subject were registered in each year, first registration date of domains is available.

[phranque]

Google Trends: widgets:
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=widgets [google.com]