Check if a URL has been archived by the Wayback Machine and return the closest snapshot.

Return CDX snapshots for a URL, with optional date range and status-code filter.

The Wayback Machine often crawls the same URL many times per day; raw CDX results would return one row per crawl. collapse is a server-side de-duplication: adjacent rows that share the same value in the chosen field get folded into a single representative row.

By default we collapse on the first 8 digits of the timestamp ("timestamp:8"), which is the YYYYMMDD prefix — i.e. one row per day. This is almost always what you want for "show me snapshots of this URL"; otherwise the default limit of 50 gets eaten by 50 captures from a single hour and you see nothing about the URL's history.

Override collapse when you need different granularity:

• "digest" — collapse on content hash, so you only see captures where the page actually changed

• "timestamp:10" — one row per hour (first 10 digits of timestamp)

• "" (empty string) — disable collapsing entirely; return every capture

• any other CDX collapse spec is passed through verbatim

latest=True uses CDX's fastLatest path to return the N most recent captures cheaply (much faster than a full scan over the index). Cannot be combined with from_date/to_date.

Search Internet Archive collections (uploaded books, audio, video, software items) using Lucene query syntax.

This is NOT a search over the Wayback Machine web crawl. It only returns items that someone has uploaded to archive.org as a discrete media item.

Do NOT use this for:

• Current news, journalism, or recent events

• Government circulars, press releases, or official web pages

• Wikipedia articles or any live web content

• "What was on this website" / "what URLs are archived" — use search_domain or lookup_snapshots for those.

Good uses: historical books, lecture recordings, archived films, software releases, podcast episodes, scanned magazines. Use Lucene fields when possible (e.g. subject:"civil war", creator:"NASA", collection:librivoxaudio).

Find archived URLs under a domain or path prefix. Auto-detects matchType from input.

Fetch and extract text content from an archived web page. Returns extracted text, word count, and extraction metadata.

Fetch rich structured metadata for any Internet Archive item by its identifier.