While the Wayback Machine lets you retrieve an archived document by complete URL, Archive-It Search is meant to provide a way to find documents with full text search, by keyword or some other metadata. If you have a URL you're interested in, you might view it first through the Wayback Machine, then use Search to find related documents. Or, if you're starting with a topic (such as a person's name) instead of a URL, you would want to start with Search.
By default, Archive-It Search only returns one unique result per host, much the same way Google does. You may have 500 results but they are from only 200 unique hosts. This means you could have one result showing for stanford.edu, but there are really 100 matches total. To view more results per host, you can use the advanced search page or click the more from link within individual search results.
Any document that is part of an Archive-It collection is available through Archive-It Search.
The Advanced Search form provides a simple interface for building more complex queries.
Your search will look for matches that contain all of the words you enter in this search box.
Search for an exact phrase of text. This is similar to surrounding your query in quotation marks.
Use this field to find documents that match at least one of the words you enter.
Look for results that contain any of the search terms you have entered above, but do not contain terms you enter here. For example if you wanted to search for president, but not for Lincoln you would enter president in the "any one of the words" box above and enter Lincoln in this search field.
Limit your search to one specific host by entering the host name (for example archive.org) in the search box.
By default, search results will only show one uniques result per host. You can see all results from a given host by clicking the "more from" link in the search results.
Limit your search to contain only documents that are in a specific file format. For example, word documents, pdfs etc.
Limit your search to a specific institution and collection (please note that a collection will also need to be specified).
About Search