---
title: "Explorer"
description: "The pages behind archives.agntn.dev that run the library live, and what each one is for."
canonical_url: "https://archives.agntn.dev/guide/explorer"
---
# Explorer

> The pages behind archives.agntn.dev that run the library live, and what each one is for.

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.

<table>
<thead>
  <tr>
    <th>
      Page
    </th>
    
    <th>
      What it answers
    </th>
  </tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="https://archives.agntn.dev/timeline">
        Timeline
      </a>
    </td>
    
    <td>
      Which captures exist for a target, across every provider, with a viewer for any of them
    </td>
  </tr>
  
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="https://archives.agntn.dev/compare">
        Compare
      </a>
    </td>
    
    <td>
      Two captures of one page side by side, with the diff, and sliders that walk the history
    </td>
  </tr>
  
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="https://archives.agntn.dev/site">
        Site
      </a>
    </td>
    
    <td>
      Which archives hold a domain, how many captures, first and last, a year by year heatmap
    </td>
  </tr>
  
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="https://archives.agntn.dev/urls">
        URLs
      </a>
    </td>
    
    <td>
      Every URL an archive has seen under a domain
    </td>
  </tr>
  
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="https://archives.agntn.dev/history">
        History
      </a>
    </td>
    
    <td>
      How a page changed capture by capture, ranked by the size of the change
    </td>
  </tr>
  
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="https://archives.agntn.dev/agent">
        Agent
      </a>
    </td>
    
    <td>
      The four tools with their exact text answers, and the call as JSON-RPC or TypeScript
    </td>
  </tr>
  
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="https://archives.agntn.dev/status">
        Status
      </a>
    </td>
    
    <td>
      Which providers answer right now, and how fast
    </td>
  </tr>
  
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="https://archives.agntn.dev/shelf">
        Shelf
      </a>
    </td>
    
    <td>
      Captures you kept in this browser, exported with their provenance
    </td>
  </tr>
</tbody>
</table>

## 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 visitor gets thirty new archive queries a minute. Cached answers are free. On IPv6 the visitor is the whole /64, so all 2^64 of its addresses share the same thirty. The explorer never retries a `429`. Archive.today isn't asked at all: it won't take a connection from Cloudflare Workers, so every page names it as unreachable instead of waiting twenty seconds for a `522`.


## Sitemap

See the full [sitemap](https://archives.agntn.dev/sitemap.md) for all pages.