Read full posts with the new Search tool

The Open Measures crew has been plugging away to design and develop the new Search tool which we are now proud to unveil!

After multiple requests (from journalists particularly) about a desire to see raw posts themselves without using our API, we decided to push for the Search tool. It’s simple to use. Just select a search term, date range, and platform and let the tool do its magic! 

A search for “Trump” on Parler shows some very enthusiastic responses including one person seemingly arguing against term limits

As an OSINT researcher, the Search tool provides a one-stop shop to search across various fringe / alt-tech platforms for a given term’s context. This can be useful both for finding new leads and for following up on existing hunches. As an added bonus, Open Measures’ search feature is more reliable than the ones on most of these sites.

For now, we are only showing the first 50 results in the search (to prevent system abuse) but it still gives a great sense of the nature of conversations happening about a given term and offers researchers an angle to dig in more deeply. We are working to add download capability as well.

The original posts are linked beneath the results even if they’ve since been deleted. If they have been deleted, double-check that the link can’t also be found on archive.org. 

You may notice a super fun new consent checkbox as well for the Search tool. And well, what can we say, the places we help you to analyze are super gross. The comments are unfiltered. Be warned and take good care of your brain and heart when reading content.

We have many exciting upcoming development cycles to follow this up, but one of specific interest to the Search tool will be to add boolean operators capabilities to all of our tools (though that’s already available through the API). In non-nerd speak, basically, that means you will be able to do much more complex kinds of queries such as look for mentions of “Trump” and “fraud” from specific accounts. We are also chugging away in the hopes of granting access to our back-end analysis dashboard for advanced Open Measures usage across the entirety of our public (and non-public) datasets.

Stay tuned in! More to come.