| Search Tool Released For Deleted Microsoft Knowledge Base Articles |
| Written by Kay Ewbank |
| Friday, 07 February 2020 |
|
A new tool that can help find Microsoft Knowledge Base articles that have been deleted from the Microsoft site has been launched. The Microsoft KB Archive Search is described by its creators as a targeted Wayback time machine. The incentive for creating the tool was the developers noticing that Microsoft was removing Support KB articles from its site – often even when the information was still pertinent. This is often driven by products being no longer supported by Microsoft, but the information in the articles can still be useful. The team at PKI Solutions decided to come up with a better solution than the only alternative, that of using the web archive Wayback Machine that is maintained by the Internet Archive. The PKI Solutions team point out it can be tricky because of problems such as the wrong language or incorrect layout. Instead, the team put together a list of current articles that exist or existed on the Microsoft Support website. They say: "In total we made over 5 million requests using PowerShell and retrieved about 10GB of data (including HTML and attachments)." This equated to 105,000 files, which when grouped, filtered, and packed into a SQL database comes to about 5.6GB and 4GB of attachments to articles. This has been made available from an ASP.NET Core website. The team say they want to only provide an archive for deleted content from the Microsoft KB site, so from now on they'll be tracking articles and when their scanning engine detects an article has been removed from the Microsoft site, it will be available to view in the new tool.
When entering the website, you are redirected to a search page, where you can search for articles by ID number, words in the article title or description.You can also browse for a specific product name and get a list of articles for that product. The database will be automatically updated each month. The team plans to add older archived articles from the Wayback Machine. They also plan to add the ability to subscribe for updates in the database. You will be able to opt the products you are interested in or get updates for all products.
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 07 February 2020 ) |
