The Jeff Beckham Weblog

The New York Times is reporting that this week, Sports Illustrated will take the wise move of making its entire 53-year archive of stories and photos available for free online.

The new feature, called the Vault, will also contain video clips and all of its material will be searchable by athlete, coach, team, sport, decade and year.

The real benefit, according to executives, is in the additional visibility SI.com will get from search engines, a topic I wrote about in the context of TexasMonthly.com some time ago.

“The real hidden value of this is what it does for search,” said John Squires, executive vice president of Time Inc., the Time Warner subsidiary that publishes Sports Illustrated. The move quadruples the site’s volume, he said. “We’ll have to work our way up the search algorithms over time, but eventually, someone searches Johnny Unitas, and SI.com is going to pop up.”