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Computerworld - A Dutch journalist on Thursday announced the launch of a new search engine that indexes the content of all U.S. State Department cables published so far by WikiLeaks.

The search engine, CableSearch.org, lets users search the disclosed cables by word, source, security classification, classification tag and date.

CableSearch was the brainstorm of Henk Van Ess, chairman of VVOJ (Vereniging van Onderzoeksjournalisten), or Association of Investigative Journalists, a Dutch-Flemish reporters' group, and the co-founder of the European Center of Computer Assisted Reporting (ECCAR).

In a Twitter message Thursday, Van Ess said the search engine was an "initiative of investigative reporters from eccar.org."

CableSearch replaces a simpler full-text search engine at rpgp.org operated by a German programmer identified only as "Udo," who said he would start redirecting his traffic to Van Ess's engine this weekend, then shut down his site.

Successful searches on CableSearch display one or more of the more than 680 cables WikiLeaks had released as of Friday. The organization reportedly has a cache of moe than 250,000 confidential messages from U.S. embassies, Washington D.C. and other State Department sources.

The WikiLeaks.org site has been offline since it was abandoned by its U.S. DNS (domain name system) hosting provider late Thursday night. On Friday, WikiLeaks switched to a different URL -- wikileaks.ch -- until that, too, went dark when the same DNS provider terminated the account of WikiLeaks' newest site hosting service.

Currently, WikiLeaks and its subsidiary site, Cablegate, where it's slowly publishing cables, can be reached via a several URLs, including wikileaks.nl, wikileaks.de and wikileaks.fi, as well as with the 88.80.13.160 IP address

According to reverse IP traces run by Computerworld, CableSearch is hosted by a German firm, Hetzner Online AG.

Van Ess tweeted that traffic to CableSearch had "exploded" since the search engine rated a mention in the New York Times, but said the site was holding up.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at  @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

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