FindArticles

» see findarticles.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nobody set out to visit FindArticles. You landed on it. i was in turkish engineering university between 2003 and 2010 and the pattern was always the same: type a phrase into google and end up on a page with the article body sitting there for free, under a magazine name you half recognized. to be honest. i could not have told you who owned it or where the text came from.

The thing was assembled rather than written. LookSmart supplied the search technology and the Gale Group licensed out the archive, and the two put it online in 2000 as a joint venture (close enough). It was quoting 862,000 articles by august of that year and passed five million by may 2005, which for a free site in that era was an enormous number.

The traffic followed. november 2006 put it at 17.6 million unique visitors, and by 2007 it was reaching something like eleven million articles going back to 1998. CNET Networks bought it on 9 november 2007 for $20.5 million and filed it under BNET, the business-content division that CBS Interactive later inherited along with the rest of CNET. That was close to the last time anybody wrote about it in public.

Sometime in 2012 findarticles.com stopped being findarticles.com and became a redirect to search.com, another CBS Interactive property. No announcement went out and no page explained where the archive had gone. The dead links are still sitting in wikipedia citations and in a decade of forum posts, pointing at a domain that answers with a search box.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

The business was a licensing arrangement wearing a website. Gale had already digitized decades of magazine and trade-journal back issues for its library customers, and FindArticles took a slice of that corpus and put it in front of the open web with ads against it. look, the reader got a plain page with the article text and a citation line naming the publication and the date. That was the whole product.

What made it useful was coverage of the boring middle. Academic databases wanted journals and the news sites kept their own archives behind their own paywalls, so a 1997 trade-press piece about a company nobody remembers had nowhere else to live. FindArticles had it. that is why it turned up in search results for such an odd spread of queries.

~ the slide ~

The free model did not hold. The site moved to a mixture of free and paid content, which is the usual sign that the licensing bill has outgrown the ad revenue. Gale was being paid per article served whether or not anybody clicked an ad beside it.

Google was the other problem, and it was the same problem twice. FindArticles existed because search sent people to it, so anything google did to its ranking hit the whole business at once. Google Scholar arrived in november 2004 and Google Books started digitizing the same kind of back catalog, and both of them landed on exactly the queries FindArticles had been catching.

~ the long tail ~

The domain sat as a redirect for thirteen years and then got sold. In 2025 findarticles.com went to Web Orange Limited, a company registered in Hong Kong, and the address now publishes new articles with nothing to do with the old archive. Readers who went looking have flagged the bylines as fake and the text as machine-generated.

So the address is alive and the thing it was built for is not. The Gale corpus itself never died, it went back behind the library login it came from, which is where it had been sitting in 1999. Twelve years of the open web having a free door into it turned out to be the temporary arrangement.

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