I want to make a Joomla website which stores some article about history, but I don't have any idea on how to make a search box which can search the year. I want to categories the article by year and make an menu which categories the year too.
You can try to use years as tags. To do so, when entering an article, type in year in a tag field, and click save.
Then in default Joomla search you will be able to get search results by tag.