Beginning today, eight years of episodes of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” are fully accessible on the show’s Web site.

Videos of every skit, every joke and every guest are available for free, fully searchable on TheDailyShow.com. According to Comedy Central, 13,000 videos will be stored in the database.

In an interview today, MTV’s Erik Flannigan said he doesn’t believe any other television program has opened its archives so freely on the Internet.

“There are many many years of shows that haven’t been seen since the day they aired,” said Mr. Flannigan, the executive vice president of digital for MTV Networks Entertainment Group. “It’s not a show that would go on DVD and it’s not a show that would go into syndication, so it’s essentially been lost to history.”



Now the content can live forever online. While Web sites increasingly offer streaming versions of television shows, “The Daily Show” is unique because the videos have been made fully searchable through a system of tags. Thanks to those tags, the site serves as a handy archive of correspondent reports: 301 videos are tagged with Steve Carell’s name; 187 are tagged Mo Rocca. It also records years of jokes about newsmakers: a search for George W. Bush finds 844 videos; a search for Al Gore returns 159. Mr. Flannigan said the show’s writers and producers are thrilled to use it as a resource.

The video archive is part of a larger MTV strategy to create branded Web sites for popular shows.

“With a show that’s as deep and rich and such a part of the American zeitgeist as ‘The Daily Show,’ just having it live as a section of ComedyCentral.com doesn’t do it justice,” Mr. Flannigan said.

The new site incorporates banner advertisements, video commercials before and after a show excerpt, and advertising messages stripped across the bottom of the screen during the segments. Tivo, Hyundai, and AT&T are launch sponsors for the new site.

Mr. Flannigan said videos from the Craig Kilborn era of “The Daily Show” will be added to the site early next year. A similar site for “The Colbert Report” is also in development.