Internet Archive Scraper: search archive.org for books, audio, film and archived web

Search archive.org the way its own advanced search works, and get the results as rows: the identifier, the title, the creator, the year, the download count, the subject tags and the link. Filter to one media type, sort by downloads, by date or by what was added most recently.

The metadata is written by whoever uploaded the item, so it is uneven. Plenty of items have no creator, no year and no description, and that is the archive rather than a gap here. The sample row further down is exactly that case.

Input	Search keywords, or a Lucene query
Output	One row per archive.org item
Ceiling	10,000 items per run
Account needed	None, and no API key
Price	$2.00 per 1,000 items, flat on every plan

🔍 What Internet Archive Scraper does

Plain keywords work. So does the archive's own query syntax, which is worth knowing if you are doing anything precise: title:(grateful dead) AND year:[1977 TO 1980] does what it looks like it does.

Pick a media type to stay inside books, audio, film, software, images, archived web pages, datasets or collections, or leave it empty and get everything. Sorting is by downloads, by the item's own date, by when it was added to the archive, or by the archive's relevance ranking.

The run pages a hundred at a time until it has the number of unique items you asked for or the result set runs out.

📥 What you give it

{
  "query": "title:(apollo 11) AND year:[1969 TO 1972]",
  "mediaType": "movies",
  "sort": "downloads",
  "maxItems": 500
}

Field	Default	What it is
query	box starts at nasa apollo	Keywords, or an archive.org Lucene query. Required.
mediaType	any	texts, audio, movies, software, image, web, data or collection. Empty means any.
sort	downloads	downloads, date for the item's own date, publicdate for recently added, or relevance.
maxItems	100	How many unique items to return, up to 10,000.
notionConnector	none	Optional. Writes each item into your Notion once the run finishes.
notionParentId	none	Optional. The Notion data source to write into.
proxyConfiguration	off	Optional network settings. Off by default, and a normal run does not need it.

Put your own brackets around an OR. The media type filter is added to the end of your query, and archive.org reads jazz OR blues with a filter on the end as "jazz, or blues of that media type". Write (jazz OR blues) and the filter covers both.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a recent run:

{
  "ok": true,
  "identifier": "apolloaudiocollection",
  "title": "Apollo",
  "creator": null,
  "year": null,
  "date": null,
  "mediaType": "collection",
  "downloads": 1259223,
  "subjects": [],
  "description": null,
  "publicdate": "2010-12-06T19:02:28Z",
  "url": "https://archive.org/details/apolloaudiocollection"
}

Field	What it is
identifier	The archive's permanent key for the item, and the part of the URL that matters. Use it to dedupe and to fetch the item's files elsewhere.
creator, year, date	null whenever the uploader left them blank, which is often.
mediaType	Which kind of item it is. collection means a container of other items, not a single thing you can play or read.
downloads	The archive's count, and 0 when the field was missing altogether.
subjects	The uploader's tags, as an array. Frequently empty.
description	The first 500 characters as the uploader wrote it, HTML and all, so strip it before displaying it.
publicdate	When the item was added to archive.org, which is not the same as when it was made.

🧾 Reading the output

Two kinds of row land in your dataset, and ok tells them apart.

Row	How to spot it	Charged
An item	ok: true and an identifier	yes
A diagnostic	ok: false and an errorCode	no

The overview table in the Apify console shows the item columns only, so a diagnostic row looks blank there. Switch to the JSON or All fields view to read it.

Code	What it means
BAD_INPUT	No query, or a media type that is not one of the listed values.
NO_RESULTS	The search worked and nothing matched. The numFound field on the row shows the archive's own count.
RATE_LIMITED	archive.org asked for a slower pace than the run could keep. Try a smaller run.
SERVER_ERROR	archive.org answered 5xx. Usually passes.
BLOCKED	archive.org refused the request. Re-run it.
NETWORK	archive.org was unreachable, or answered with something that was not the JSON it promised. The details field says which.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Internet Archive Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Type keywords into Search query, or paste an archive.org query if you have one.
3. Pick a Media type unless you want everything.
4. Set Max items, choose a Sort by, then click Start.
5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$2.00 per 1,000 items. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per item delivered. Items that appear twice across pages are dropped before they are counted, diagnostic rows are not charged, and a search that matches nothing is not charged.

💡 What people use it for

• Finding every archived recording of a band or a broadcaster, sorted by what people actually play.
• Building a reading list of public domain books on a subject, with the identifiers to fetch them.
• Checking whether a site was captured, using the web media type.
• Tracking what a collection has gained recently, with sort on publicdate and a schedule.
• Handing a model a list of source material with links, rather than a page of search results.

🚧 What it does not do

• Metadata and a link, never the files. No books, audio, video or page captures are downloaded.
• It does not read Wayback Machine snapshots. Archived sites appear as items under the web media type, not as captures of a URL on a given date.
• Uploader metadata is patchy. Missing creators, years and descriptions are normal.
• downloads cannot tell you zero from missing. Both read 0.
• Collections are containers. A collection row is a shelf, not an item, and it shows up whenever you leave the media type empty.
• description keeps the uploader's HTML and stops at 500 characters, which can cut mid-tag.
• 10,000 items per run, and archive.org's own result set can end sooner.
• No file lists, sizes or formats. Take the identifier to the archive's item page for those.

🧭 Which archive scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Anything held on archive.org, by keyword	This one
Book metadata, ISBNs and covers	Books Scraper
Reader ratings and reviews for books	Goodreads Books Scraper
Scholarly papers with abstracts and citations	OpenAlex Scraper
Wikipedia articles as clean text	Wikipedia Scraper

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need an archive.org account? No. This reads the public search that anyone can use.

Can I download the books or the audio? Not from this actor. Take the identifier from each row and fetch the item's files from archive.org directly.

Why do some rows have no creator or year? Because nobody typed them in when the item was uploaded. The archive accepts what it is given.

Can I use the archive's advanced query syntax? Yes, the query goes through as written. Field searches and date ranges both work.

Why did my media type filter let other things through? An unbracketed OR in the query. Wrap it: (jazz OR blues).

Is this legal? The search index is public and this reads it the way a browser does. What you may then do with a given item depends on that item's own rights, which vary enormously across the archive. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the query you used. The errorCode on the diagnostic row usually names the problem on its own.