Explorer
Every explorer page calls the same executors the MCP server uses, through the docs worker. Nothing on these pages is a mock; a slow answer is the archive being slow, and a 429 is the archive saying no.
| Page | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Timeline | Which captures exist for a target, across every provider, with a viewer for any of them |
| Compare | Two captures of one page side by side, with the diff, and sliders that walk the history |
| Site | Which archives hold a domain, how many captures, first and last, a year by year heatmap |
| URLs | Every URL an archive has seen under a domain |
| History | How a page changed capture by capture, ranked by the size of the change |
| Agent | The four tools with their exact text answers, and the call as JSON-RPC or TypeScript |
| Status | Which providers answer right now, and how fast |
| Shelf | Captures you kept in this browser, exported with their provenance |
The viewer
A capture opens in one of three modes. Replay frames the archive's own playback, only for archives that allow framing. Source draws the archived markup inside a sandboxed frame with no scripts, a policy that admits only assets from the archive's host, and a <base> on the capture. Text is what archives_content returns. Every capture has a permalink under /capture/<provider>/<stamp>/<url>, a citation to copy, and a bookmark for the shelf.
Caching and manners
Answers are cached on the worker, in KV in production, for thirty minutes to six hours depending on the page, and a cron warms the demo targets. A failed answer is never cached, and one where a provider failed is kept for five minutes only, so an outage does not stick. One address can start thirty new archive queries a minute; answers served from the cache do not count. The explorer never retries a 429; Archive.today in particular throttles automated readers, and the viewer says so instead of hammering it.