Late last month, more than two decades worth of music and entertainment journalism vanished when Paramount Global suddenly disabled the MTV News website. Just over a week later, the Internet Archive has responded by creating a searchable collection of the old MTV News site through the Wayback Machine.

The collection comprises over 460,575 webpage snapshots, which the Internet Archive has amassed over the years. As Variety (which first reported the collection) notes, the archive appears to go as far back as 1997, though it doesn’t contain every single thing MTV News published over the years. Many images in the archived pages also didn’t survive, but the original text of these pieces remains intact. ... (snip)

Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive tells Rolling Stone via email, “The Internet Archive has been archiving Mtv.com/news for decades and what we have is on the Wayback Machine. We built a full text search engine for MTV News to help find pages. We apologize that it may not be complete. When publishers announce they are going offline we have a better chance of getting a complete snapshot. As a library, preserving cultural heritage is what we do. We hope this is useful.”

A source close to production at Paramount does tell Rolling Stone that nothing on MTV News has been deleted and that the company is “exploring how to make this important content available in a more efficient way.”