Internet Archive Search Scraper

Search public Internet Archive items through its Advanced Search API. The Actor accepts the values users normally enter or select—query, media type, collection, creator, language, year range, and sort—then returns stable, typed item records. No API key or login is required.

Input

query accepts words or Internet Archive Advanced Search syntax. Optional filters are combined with that query and confirmed against the parameters echoed by the API response. maxItems is the hard global record limit; rowsPerPage and maxPages bound native API pagination.

{
  "query": "climate change",
  "mediaTypes": ["texts"],
  "languages": ["English"],
  "yearFrom": 2020,
  "yearTo": 2026,
  "sortBy": "downloads",
  "sortDirection": "desc",
  "maxItems": 20,
  "maxPages": 2,
  "rowsPerPage": 10,
  "useApifyProxy": false
}

Proxy settings support direct access, Apify Proxy groups/country selection, or user-provided HTTP(S) proxy URLs. Proxy credentials are never logged.

Output

Each dataset record represents one Archive item and can include:

• stable id and native identifier;
• title, description, creators, publisher, media type, collections, languages, subjects, and formats;
• normalized item/public dates, year, and numeric download count;
• canonical item and metadata URLs;
• query, sort, page, and contiguous position context;
• source and scrape timestamp.

Optional values absent from the source are omitted. Raw API responses, transport internals, proxy credentials, cookies, and error bodies are never stored.

Reliability and limits

The Actor validates HTTP status and JSON content type before parsing, caps response size, rejects malformed or unexpected payloads, and verifies the API-echoed query, rows, start offset, and sort. Temporary network, rate-limit, and server failures use bounded progressive backoff. Results are deduplicated by Internet Archive identifier and written only after all selected pages pass validation.

Internet Archive controls public index availability and ranking. relevance uses the service's native default ordering; sort direction applies to explicit fields. This Actor does not access private items or bypass access controls.