Arquivo Pt MCP Server

@pipeworx/arquivo-pt

Full-text search of archived web pages in Arquivo.pt, the Portuguese web archive run by FCCN (captures since 1996). Where the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (pack wayback) needs the URL, Arquivo.pt indexes the text of what it captured, so a caller can find archived pages by phrase, then read a capture's extracted text or list every preserved version of a URL.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1721+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• arquivo_search_pages(query, from?, to?, site?, type?, limit?, offset?, per_site?) — full-text hits for terms or a quoted phrase: title, original URL, capture date, decoded snippet, archived replay URL, extracted-text and screenshot links, plus estimated_total and next_offset. Zero hits answer found:false with reason:"no_match" and a hint.
• arquivo_url_history(url, from?, to?, limit?, offset?) — every preserved capture of a domain, host or full URL, newest first, with capture timestamp, crawl HTTP status, MIME type, size, digest and replay links. Zero captures answer found:false with reason:"no_captures".
• arquivo_page_text(url, timestamp, max_chars?) — the plain text Arquivo.pt extracted from one capture (original_url + captured_at_ts of a hit). A capture that does not exist answers found:false, reason:"capture_not_found".

Every response carries source (the exact upstream URL) and data_as_of. A transport failure, a non-JSON body or a changed response shape throws a loud error naming Arquivo.pt and the HTTP status — never an empty list.

Auth

Keyless.

Coverage, honestly

• Centred on the Portuguese web (.pt sites and Portuguese-language pages), but international pages linked from them are captured too. Probed 2026-10-08: "climate change" ≈ 52.8M estimated hits (ipcc.ch, eea.europa.eu), "quantum computing" ≈ 1.08M (microsoft.com, en.wikipedia.org), "Federal Reserve interest rates" ≈ 1.9M (federalreserve.gov, vox.com). English queries work; the top hits skew to pages Portuguese sites cite.
• The full-text index lags the crawl by years. Probed 2026-10-08, a search restricted to from=2022 returns 0 hits on most calls, one node answered with 2023 captures, and arquivo_url_history lists captures from mid-2026. Use the URL history for anything recent.
• Arquivo.pt load-balances across index nodes that disagree. From a live Cloudflare Worker on 2026-10-08 the same URL returned, minutes apart: real hits in 30-37 s; real hits in 1-6 s with FAWP* collection ids and a hostKey field; response_items: [] with estimated_nr_results 3.5M; and response_items: [{}, {}, {}] (429 bytes, every row empty) — the last one for every unquoted multi-word query for a stretch, while a laptop got real hits for the identical URL and a quoted phrase answered correctly from the Worker. The pack retries once with maxItems nudged and then throws an error naming the fault; rows with no URL/timestamp are never returned as hits (dropped_malformed_rows counts them). Some nodes also ignore maxItems (9 rows for 5); hits are capped at limit.
• The pack sends to only when you pass one. The upstream default (the previous calendar year) already covers the whole index, and forcing to=<now> made the same query return zero items from a live Worker while estimated_nr_results stayed at 3.8M (probed twice, 2026-10-08).
• Hits are deduplicated to 2 per site by default (per_site); raise it to see more captures of one site.

Data sources

• https://arquivo.pt/textsearch?q=… — full-text search (q, from, to, siteSearch, type, maxItems ≤ 500, offset, dedupValue, dedupField).
• https://arquivo.pt/textsearch?versionHistory=… — URL version history.
• https://arquivo.pt/textextracted?m=… — extracted text of one capture. The m value is the original URL followed by / and the 14-digit timestamp, so a URL ending in / yields // before the stamp — that is correct, do not "fix" it.
• API reference: https://github.com/arquivo/pwa-technologies/wiki/Arquivo.pt-API. A URL passed as q is an HTTP 400 upstream; the pack refuses it first and points at arquivo_url_history.
• Snippets come back HTML-escaped with Latin-1 named entities (Inteligência); the pack decodes them.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arquivo-pt": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/arquivo-pt/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/arquivo-pt/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1721+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/arquivo_search_pages \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"\"inteligência artificial\"","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/arquivo_search_pages. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arquivo-pt": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-arquivo-pt"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-arquivo-pt

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Arquivo Pt data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT