Ask HN: Is there any way to find an archive of search results pages?

by SteveVeilStream on 2/24/2025, 3:20:21 AM with 1 comments
Edit to add: At least one person now confirms that the maps have listed at least one of the parks as a state park for a number of years. So it may be an interesting case of "Things you don't notice until you are looking for them." For a variety of reasons, I'm still interested in knowing if there is a way to access an archive of previous search results. E.g. It would be interesting to see what a search for "Generative AI" would have returned five years ago.

Folks in Canada have noticed that when they search for provincial parks in Google Maps or Google Search (e.g. "Joffre Lakes Provincial Park") that in the description /smart summary, these provincial parks are now being labelled as state parks by Google. Everyone feels that they used to be described as provincial parks but they can't be sure and no one has any historical screenshots. It's possible no one ever paid attention before and it always attached the "state parks" metadata to these results. Of course, these types of pages are not archived by the WayBackMachine. It got me thinking that it is actually quite interesting to see how search results for specific terms change over time. Is there any service that archives search results pages over time?

Note: Of course, you are free to comment as you wish but my preference is to avoid a political debate about Canadian sovereignty. Despite the example, I am really just interested in the technical question at hand.

  • by cldellow on 2/24/2025, 4:44:23 AM

    Search engine rankings, both live and historical, have value to marketers.

    Google makes it challenging to reliably crawl their rankings at scale, so there is a real cost to collecting this data.

    As a result, there aren't good, open, public archives of rankings. There are paid services like Semrush, though.