Searchable portal for the Everquest Archives
 

Some may be aware that I do a lot of research.

Over the course of the past two years I've collected over 4 million files while dumping Everquest-related websites, deprecated Yahoo Groups mailing lists, and more.

Making these easily searchable has been a constant puzzle. But I've now been able to leverage Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Cognitive Search to create a searchable portal to the eq archives.

Presenting, the Everquest Archives search portal:

https://eqarchives.azurewebsites.net/

So far I have been able to index 335,000 of the 4 million files, including all the Yahoo Groups mailing lists. They are context-searchable and metadata fields will give you links to the original Wayback Machine archive link.

Indexing the archives is proving expensive, so I will be soliciting donations at a future time to continue the process. For now, you can enjoy the 335,000 indexed documents, which include the Sony boards, EQ Stratics, Casters Realm, and a few others (alphabetically, the contents of /websites/ in the Git archive up to the letter E).

Let me know what you think!

Funny enough I tried to PM you a couple weeks ago as to whether you could search for some specific things, except I couldn't because you seem to have forum PMs turned off. What a nice looking resource you've built. There are a few items I intend to search for as time and motivation permit.

Danth

I noticed there's a bug on mobile where if you search for something and press the enter button instead of the magnifying glass, your result gets reset to * on the results page. Really annoying, I will try to fix it when able.

For now, if you're on mobile, press the magnifying glass to start your search.

This is awesome! Any chance you have Graffe's on your list of sites to index/archive?

-Mcoy

It's in the Git archive but I haven't gotten that far yet with indexing (G is after E, hehe).

It is quite expensive to index this. I need to firm up the pricing from Azure then I will ask for donations to continue the process.

Great initiative.

I can provide mirroring of this if needed, just let me know. Never know what will happen to the main site in a few years.

The hosting is pretty easy, the site is just a tiny .netcoreapp, but it's backed by an Azure Search Service which is.... harder to mirror. I'm actually not sure if the data can be exported. :confused:

HNGHHHH great work! Can't wait to dive in.

Artelius