Under the hood of the world's largest 1990s web preservation engine. Built with battle-tested infrastructure designed to capture, store, and serve 4.2 million archived pages.
A four-layer architecture designed for massive-scale archival with fault-tolerant storage and lightning-fast retrieval.
We've carefully selected each technology to balance performance, reliability, and the unique demands of archival science.
Custom-built distributed crawler optimized for 90s-era HTML, handling frames, tables, and early JavaScript with 99.2% capture accuracy.
Fine-tuned Elasticsearch cluster with era-specific tokenization, supporting semantic search across 4.2M documents in under 50ms.
Write-Once Read-Many immutable object storage built on S3-compatible infrastructure with cryptographic integrity verification for every archived asset.
Pixel-perfect rendering engine that faithfully reproduces Netscape 3.0, IE 4.0, and early web layouts using headless browser technology with custom style engines.
High-throughput API layer handling 12,000+ requests per second with built-in rate limiting, authentication, and request/response caching.
Comprehensive observability stack tracking crawl health, storage integrity, API performance, and archival completeness in real-time.
Every page goes through a rigorous seven-step pipeline ensuring complete and faithful preservation.
Seed URLs are ingested from web rings, directories, and user submissions
Content hashes prevent redundant crawls of already-archived pages
Full page content, assets, and metadata are fetched and snapshot
DOM parsing extracts links, text, and structured metadata
Cryptographic signature ensures archival integrity
Indexed for search and stored in WASM with IPFS replication
Published globally via CDN with retro rendering on-demand
Interact with our archive programmatically using our REST API or one of our official SDKs.
Explore the core API endpoints for interacting with the archive.
Search archived pages with era filters, format constraints, and semantic matching. Returns paginated results with metadata.
Retrieve a fully restored version of an archived page, rendered in its original context with all assets.
Submit a URL for archival capture. Supports depth configuration, schedule, and notification webhooks.
Get chronological snapshots of a specific URL over time, showing how pages evolved across years.
Retrieve aggregate statistics: archive size, crawl rates, format distribution, and preservation metrics.
Request archival removal under DMCA or privacy concerns. Triggers verification workflow before deletion.
Real-time performance metrics from our global infrastructure.