FASTQ is a standard file format for DNA sequencing data, which stores both nucleotides and quality scores. A typical sequencing study can easily generate hundreds of gigabytes of FASTQ files, while public archives such as ENA and NCBI and large international collaborations such as the Cancer Genome Atlas can accumulate many terabytes of data in this format. Compression tools such as gzip are often used to reduce the storage burden but have the disadvantage that the data must be decompressed before they can be used. Here, we present BEETL-fastq, a tool that not only compresses FASTQ-formatted DNA reads more compactly than gzip but also permits rapid search for k-mer queries within the archived sequences. Importantly, the full FASTQ record of each matching read or read pair is returned, allowing the search results to be piped directly to any of the many standard tools that accept FASTQ data as input.