PLUS D: 'What Google should be like'

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks speaks to the media and members of the public from a balcony at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Picture: AP file Source: AP

WIKILEAKS has launched its own search engine.

At midnight this morning - via Skype, from the Equadorian embassy - Julian Assange unveiled the new search engine named PLUS D (The Public Library of United States Diplomacy).

The search engine is a portal to an archive of 1.7 million US diplomatic cables which include 250,000 leaked State Department cables that were made public during Cablegate, the time in US history where memos of Henry Kissinger's time as US Secretary of State were made public.

And more than 251,000 of those cables relate to events or communications between 2003-2010.

Assange confirmed that the US state department documents listed on PLUS D are already declassified and much of the information has already been available in the US National Archives and Record Agency.

Assange said that the range of publicly-available documents range in the number of two million and were therefore not efficient to search through.

"Just look at The Kissinger Cables to be released today, they are technically in the public domain," he said… They were not practical or efficient for people to make sense of them or to use them.

"There would be about 1.7 new PDF files of information so they're not essentially usable to do sophisticated searches across the lot."

The search engine is a marked change from WikiLeaks who have previously relied on "old school" style of journalism. During his press conference Assange said Plus D would make it easier for journalists to conduct investigations, by using a search algorithm that "rivalled Google".

"It is a search system that I am quite proud of," he said. "One of our people recently said this is what Google should be like.

"This is a search system that investigative journalists can use effectively."

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