Page search

Last updated on June 23rd, 2021 at 05:25 pm

1. What can I find through Arquivo.pt?

You can find historical content in several languages archived from the web since 1996. We hold mainly Portuguese sites but also international sites (see examples of pages preserved by Arquivo.pt).

If you hold historical web content, please supply them to us.

2. How can I search the information preserved by Arquivo.pt?

You can search:

  • by term, entering terms or expressions you want to find in the archived contents (e.g.: expo 98)
  • by address, entering the content URL to access its history (e.g.: http://www.fccn.pt)
  • using the advanced search, where you can choose other options, for instance, format or web site (e.g.: PDF files at Público newspaper site)

3. What does the date displayed for each web-archived file mean?

It is the content archiving date.

Though it would be interesting to present the publication date, most of the contents on the Web do not provide this information. Therefore, it is only possible to present accurately the date on which a content was archived.

4. Are there only pages archived after 1996?

Yes.

We perform periodic crawls since January 2008. The only way to preserve contents published prior to that, is gathering them from external entities that have saved them over time.

5. Can I increase the number of results on the results page?

Yes.

In the advanced search page.

6. Why are there pages that do not appear in the results or  are not complete?

There are several reasons, for instance:

In “Options” use the “complete page” functionality and try to recover contents that are not in Arquivo.pt.

Use the “replay with old browser” option to reproduce the old page with an appearance closer to the original.

7. Why are some searches slow?

The more terms the query expression has, the slower is the search. We are, however, continuously improving our system.

8. What is the criterion to sort the search results?

Relevance.The ranking system uses several page features to present the most relevant results for a search.In general, a preserved page that contains the search term in its title, text, address or anchor text of incoming links is considered to be more relevant for the search.In the advanced search page you can choose to sort results by date.You can learn more about the search results ranking through our publications.9. Can I obtain and save the results of a search?

9. Can I obtain and save the results of a search?

Yes, go to “Options” select “Export results” in an Excel table or in one of the available formats (csv, ods, txt).

10.  Can I get a copy of a page?

Yes. Under “Options” there are two ways to get a copy of a page:

Screenshot – generates an image of the page that you can download
Print – generates a PDF that you can download or send to the printer

If you want to get the original file of the preserved page, which includes the code, in “Options” look for “Technical Details” and select “linkToOriginalFile”.

11. What are the technical details?

Response fields that can be obtained from the API (Application Programming Interface).