web-archive

Arquivo.pt (Portuguese Web Archive)

Portugal's national web archive, preserving billions of files since 1996, including many non-Portuguese sites. Unusually among web archives it offers full-text search over the preserved pages as well as URL lookup, through both its website and free APIs. Turn to it when you need to search inside archived page text rather than only retrieve a known address, or when researching Portuguese and European web history.

Web pages / sites API

Search this archive

Why it’s useful & how it works

Arquivo.pt stands out from most web archives because it offers genuine full-text search across preserved pages, not just URL lookup. You can type a phrase or topic into its search interface and retrieve passages from pages as they existed years ago, which is invaluable for tracing how a subject was covered on the Portuguese-language web over time. URL lookup and full-text search are both available through its website and through free, keyless APIs that return results as JSON. It covers far more than Portuguese sites alone, making it a strong choice for broader research into early web history.

What’s inside

As of early 2025 the archive holds over 21 billion web pages from approximately 47 million websites, totalling around 1.4 petabytes of data. Preservation began in 1996 and includes over 1.8 billion images.

API access

CDX https://arquivo.pt/wayback/cdx?url=&output=json ; full-text https://arquivo.pt/textsearch?q= ; replay https://arquivo.pt/wayback/ <ts>/<url>

What we measured

Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.

Reachability

Direct request: Responded HTTP 200 4.7 s
Through a datacenter proxy: Responded HTTP 200 4.8 s
API, direct: Responded HTTP 200 300 ms
API, through a proxy: Responded HTTP 200 1.1 s

Did a real search return anything?

Inconclusive · median 10.5 s · down during the run

Slow: budget for long waits, or call it asynchronously.

Our proxy pool could not connect, so this query never reached the archive: inconclusive, not a failure of the archive.

Benchmark coverage

Found 0 of 10 test items (0%) in the Web pages / sites cluster. Median response 1.2 s.

By how well known the item is: 0/3 well-known, 0/4 mid, 0/3 obscure .

Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Search checked 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.