Archive.org Advanced Search: Internet Archive Scraper

Try it in one click: open Try for free on Apify, press Try for free, and the Console form opens with this demo input already filled in (creator:"Mark Twain", texts, 10 items). Press Start to see it run.

Demo input and the first 3 rows it returns (live local run against archive.org):

identifier	title	creator	downloads
mark-twai	Mark Twain Complete collection Public domain	Mark Twain	22717
LifeOfMississippi	Life Of Mississippi	Mark Twain	13454
WarPrayer-English-MarkTwain	WAR PRAYER - ENGLISH - MARK TWAIN	MARK TWAIN	11702

{ "query": "creator:\"Mark Twain\"", "mediaType": "texts", "maxItems": 10, "sortBy": "downloads" }

Wayback Machine mode: list archived snapshots of any URL or domain

Set mode to wayback to list Wayback Machine captures through the official CDX API (no browser, no proxy). One row per capture: URL, capture time, HTTP status, MIME type, content digest, size, a viewable snapshot link and a raw snapshot link. Same price as item search: $0.001 per row, empty results are free.

{ "mode": "wayback", "waybackUrl": "example.com", "collapse": "digest", "statusCode": "200", "maxItems": 25 }

First rows of that run (real run, 25 rows returned):

capturedAt	url	statusCode	digest
2002-01-20T14:25:10Z	http://example.com:80/	200	HT2DYGA5UKZCPBSFVCV3JOBXGW2G5UUA
2002-03-28T01:28:21Z	http://www.example.com:80/	200	UY3I2DT2AMWAY6DECFCFYMT5ZOTFHUCH

• waybackUrl: page or domain. matchType: exact (default), prefix, host, domain (host plus subdomains).
• waybackFrom / waybackTo: capture range, YYYY, YYYYMM or YYYYMMDD.
• statusCode: keep only captures with this HTTP status, e.g. 200.
• collapse: digest keeps only captures where the page content changed (track website changes over time); day, month, year keep one capture per period.
• maxItems caps rows and cost.

Use it to see how a page changed, find old URLs of a site, recover removed pages, or build link lists for research and SEO audits. Item search (default mode) is described below.

Archive.org advanced search to clean JSON. Search the Internet Archive for books, magazines, audio, movies, software and images and export one row per item: title, creator, date, media type, collections, download count, subjects, language, license, file count, total size, item page URL and download URL. It uses the official archive.org advancedsearch and metadata JSON APIs: no browser, no proxy, no login. Pay $0.001 per item ($1 per 1,000); a search with no results has no item charges.

Use it for building datasets of public domain books, collecting audio or video collections for research, library and archive cataloguing, OSINT, training-data sourcing (check each item's license), and feeding archive.org lists into Zapier, Make, n8n or your own pipeline through the Apify API.

Input

• query: keywords or archive.org advanced search syntax, e.g. public domain cookbook, creator:"Mark Twain", subject:chemistry AND language:eng.
• mediaType: all (default), texts, movies, audio, software, image, web, etree, data, collection.
• collection: only items in one collection (americana, prelinger, librivoxaudio, nasa, ...).
• dateFrom / dateTo: YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD range on the item date.
• maxItems: 1 to 5000 (default 100). Caps your cost.
• sortBy: relevance (default), downloads, date_newest, date_oldest.
• includeFileList: add a files array per item (name, format, size, download URL). Needs one extra metadata call per item, so it runs at about 2 items per second.

Example input:

{ "query": "public domain cookbook", "mediaType": "texts", "maxItems": 100, "sortBy": "downloads" }

Output

One dataset row per item, for example:

{
  "identifier": "lesrecettesdupet0000sadk",
  "title": "Les recettes du petit chef",
  "creator": "Sadler, Ann",
  "date": "1999-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "mediaType": "texts",
  "collection": ["inlibrary", "printdisabled"],
  "downloads": 42,
  "description": "...",
  "subjects": ["Cooking"],
  "language": "eng",
  "license": null,
  "itemUrl": "https://archive.org/details/lesrecettesdupet0000sadk",
  "downloadUrl": "https://archive.org/download/lesrecettesdupet0000sadk",
  "fileCount": 30,
  "totalSizeBytes": 5412345
}

Fields that archive.org does not provide are null (or an empty list for collection and subjects). downloadUrl is the item's file directory; set includeFileList to get a direct URL for each file.

Good to know

• Rate limit: the actor sends an identifying User-Agent, makes at most 2 requests per second and retries on HTTP 429 and 5xx with backoff.
• Only the Internet Archive item APIs are covered. This actor does not query Wayback Machine / CDX captures.
• A listed item is not necessarily free to reuse: check the license field and the item page for rights.
• Not affiliated with the Internet Archive. Built with AI help (Claude).

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per item returned, plus Apify's standard actor-start event. Searches with no results add no item charges.

Related actors

• Sitemap Extractor Plus: lists the URLs a site publishes in its sitemaps.
• RSS/Atom Feed Reader (bulk): reads feeds from sources you found.
• Shot PDF: saves a screenshot or PDF of a page you want to keep.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Call this actor from an AI agent (Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client) through the Apify MCP server. Add this URL as an MCP server in your client: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=pennydata/archive-org-items-search It exposes this actor as a tool the agent can run with the same input as above. An Apify API token is required. This actor was built with AI assistance.