Talksearch.io - Advanced Bitcointalk Search Engine

[NotATether]

Thanks to the kind sir who tipped 0.008BTC. It's appreciated! 

[NotATether]

We are now 400,000 topics away from a completed re-indexing. Once this is done, all of the old stale & deleted posts should be fully removed from Talksearch's servers. If there are any left, I will inspect and manually purge them myself.

After that, I need to do another re-index with November 2025 as the cut-off date (when I started the scraper - it is a miracle the server did not crash or reboot during this time) following which a host of updates will be pushed to the search engine backend.

[NotATether]

We are now at the 5.3 millionth topic. Only a few more to go, and then I can finally make the long-awaited upgrades to Talksearch I've been holding back for so long.

Also I haven't moved the indexer to the more powerful server yet - so once I do that, performance will increase massively!

[NotATether]

Talksearch is temporarily down while I move the post database to the new server.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

[NotATether]

Talksearch v2 is here!

Talksearch has been significantly upgraded and many new changes have been made to search and the site.

- Natural language search powered by ELSER, link graphs (just like in Google), and merits. Now your queries will return relevant posts.
- Search the forum in your language - select a language from the top dropdown to search the forum in that language.
- Open full posts directly inside search results, with BitcoinTalk formatting preserved.
- Copy posts as BBCode for easy quoting on the forum.
- Misspellings in search queries are automatically corrected.
- More powerful Advanced Search filters for boards, authors, topics, dates, languages, and recent posts.
- Help improve results with relevant/not relevant feedback buttons below every post.
- Search operators just like in Google search.

The search index of Bitcointalk posts is now up-to-date for the first time, with new topics, replies, and edits/deletes being collected almost immediately after performing the action.

I know this migration took much longer than expected, so I apologize for the downtime. Feel free to enjoy searching now!

[MarryWithBTC]

Congratulations for the massive update, a lot of time and resources were actually invested.

- Search the forum in your language - select a language from the top dropdown to search the forum in that language.

I consider this as the strongest update. I have seen many people struggle to use the general board because of poor English, they will find this feature so interesting and helpful.

- More powerful Advanced Search filters for boards, authors, topics, dates, languages, and recent posts.

Will introducing conceptual search possible? If i want to search old posts but I do not remember the exact keywords of the thread, searching by describing the idea will be great.

For example, I could search discussion about panic selling of bitcoin during unexpected crash and get "I AM HODLING" thread.

[NotATether]

- Search the forum in your language - select a language from the top dropdown to search the forum in that language.

I consider this as the strongest update. I have seen many people struggle to use the general board because of poor English, they will find this feature so interesting and helpful.

Next up, will be actually translating the site into different languages. I have locked the poll above, and it can be seen that a majority of users want this feature.

(AoBT, this is your bat-signal. )

Will introducing conceptual search possible? If i want to search old posts but I do not remember the exact keywords of the thread, searching by describing the idea will be great.

For example, I could search discussion about panic selling of bitcoin during unexpected crash and get "I AM HODLING" thread.

That would only work if some reply in the thread mentioned panic selling of bitcoin somewhere.

Semantic search allows us to search by related forms of a word, but it does not help for searching for synonyms or abstract concepts.

[MarryWithBTC]

Will introducing conceptual search possible? If i want to search old posts but I do not remember the exact keywords of the thread, searching by describing the idea will be great.

For example, I could search discussion about panic selling of bitcoin during unexpected crash and get "I AM HODLING" thread.

That would only work if some reply in the thread mentioned panic selling of bitcoin somewhere.

Semantic search allows us to search by related forms of a word, but it does not help for searching for synonyms or abstract concepts.

Okay, I understand the distinction now. Semantic search can bridge the wordings gap but will not out rightly return concepts not represented in the indexed texts.

Who knows, as the project continue growing and with the aid of AI, there could be a time such a search where results are returned by merely describing the concept will be available. But that will be an advanced level computation with unnecessary high cost  not fit for a free service.

[DYING_S0UL]

Next up, will be actually translating the site into different languages. I have locked the poll above, and it can be seen that a majority of users want this feature.

(AoBT, this is your bat-signal. )

Semantic search allows us to search by related forms of a word, but it does not help for searching for synonyms or abstract concepts.

Lol, you might have to wait till August ends, as the whole AOBT is on a vacation right now! 

Also would you mind explaining this Semantic search feature again? I still didn't get any of it! Maybe an example would help understanding.

Furthermore, why is there two "Advanced Search" buttons? The second one feels kind of unnecessary to me.
 
(p.s: hid the promotional banner for obvious reason)

[Sterlino]

Lol, you might have to wait till August ends, as the whole AOBT is on a vacation right now! 

Also would you mind explaining this Semantic search feature again? I still didn't get any of it! Maybe an example would help understanding.

Furthermore, why is there two "Advanced Search" buttons? The second one feels kind of unnecessary to me.
 
(p.s: hid the promotional banner for obvious reason)
https://talkimg.com/images/2026/08/27/U76va3.png

Advanced Search in the navigation bar above is basically a part of main navigation. That means if a user wants to do an advance search after doing a normal search, he can use it by clicking on the advance search at the top of that page.

On the other one, the link for advance search is given below the search option, where the purpose of the advance search is written.

Code:

Advanced Search — filter by board, author, date, language, and more 

This is written to explain the features so that it works as an advance step or guide line for new users...

[NotATether]

Furthermore, why is there two "Advanced Search" buttons? The second one feels kind of unnecessary to me.

That was a bug, there is only supposed to be one in the navbar. Fixed now.

The Talksearch API is now live
Bitcointalk data, ready for code.

Talksearch now offers a developer API for people who need to fetch Bitcointalk posts programmatically, in real-time.

The public API currently provides search, and direct profile, post, topic lookup. It is possible to refine your search granularly with parameters in order to get only the results you want.

What is included

• Our own API endpoint
• Posts with topic, author, board, date, language, ranking, and highlight data
• Profile, topic, and post metadata ID
• Local language search
• Access by API keys with expiration date and IP restrictions
• A developer dashboard for keys, credit balance, usage, and top-up history
• Interactive API documentation on the Talksearch website.

Prepaid, pay-as-you-go access

API access uses prepaid credits at a rate of 1,000 credits per $1 (this may be subject to change). Credits can be topped up from as low as $5. Payments are handled through my BTCPayServer, the same one that powers BitMixList AML.

If you need large-scale access to Bitcointalk data, message me. We can arrange for a custom plan for you.

Example

Code:

curl --get 'https://talksearch.io/api/v1/search' \
  --data-urlencode 'q=taproot fee estimation' \
  --data-urlencode 'lang=en' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer ts_live_your_key'

Code:

curl 'https://talksearch.io/api/v1/topics/3309245' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer ts_live_your_key'

Code:

curl --get 'https://talksearch.io/api/v1/images/search' \
  --data-urlencode 'q=hardware wallet' \
  --data-urlencode 'lang=en' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer ts_live_your_key'

Get started

• Developer portal
• Documentation and live request tester
• OpenAPI 3.1 schema

Seeking translators

A few days ago, additional languages have been added to the Talksearch interface. I need help translating the site content into all these languages.

You can find the file with the translation strings here: https://file.kiwi/b8bfc83b#rh4GvC8MUpd8qcebYndn8g

For anyone who is interested, please upload the result somewhere and then reply here with the translation. There is a small payment for each translation.

[Etranger]

A few days ago, additional languages have been added to the Talksearch interface. I need help translating the site content into all these languages.

You can find the file with the translation strings here: https://file.kiwi/b8bfc83b#rh4GvC8MUpd8qcebYndn8g

For anyone who is interested, please upload the result somewhere and then reply here with the translation. There is a small payment for each translation.

I will take on the Russian translation. As soon as it's ready, I'll update you on the results.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Sorry, I am having a little trouble choosing the right words to express my thoughts/suggestion/idea. Do let me know if I was confusing.

How the hell did I miss this post--and this thread in its entirety for this long?  Gotta get back to reading lest I lost the ability to do so altogether.....heh heh.

Having said that, I have not read everything here, but regardless of how much OP paid for the service I give him props for helping out our beloved forum that is in dire need of assistance when it comes to searching for stuff.  I just wish it weren't necessary to use off-site assistance, i.e., it'd be far better if Theymos and/or the talented coders doing work on improvements would just fix the search function.  That shit has been broken beyond belief for as long as I can remember, and I could never figure out a reasonable reason why it should be that way.

[NotATether]

Having said that, I have not read everything here, but regardless of how much OP paid for the service I give him props for helping out our beloved forum that is in dire need of assistance when it comes to searching for stuff.  I just wish it weren't necessary to use off-site assistance, i.e., it'd be far better if Theymos and/or the talented coders doing work on improvements would just fix the search function.  That shit has been broken beyond belief for as long as I can remember, and I could never figure out a reasonable reason why it should be that way.

To be fair, search in PHP is absolutely horrible, and due to the fact that it's running on a web server and a database, it was always going to struggle like an old Toyota when searching a forum this large. I don't think there was anything Theymos could've done about that part.

Putting everything in Elasticsearch and throwing so many monster cores at it made a huge difference. The first time I tried this method in a prototype.... wow. I could not believe how fast the results were.

It took nearly a year to completely scrape the forum for the up-to-date posts and edits though, to catch up to all that. So that was the main bottleneck for me.


Another thing I learned: The "latest post" preview next to a board only shows the latest post in that board and in the child boards, but not any that may be in grandchild boards and below. An example is this post in Electrum, which is newer than this post in Development and Technical discussion, but the latter post is shown in the preview on the main page instead, whereas the first one only appears when you go inside the Dev & Tech board or the Wallet Software board.

[MisFoxie]

We usually open some topics and want to make sure that we don't accidentally create a duplicate topic, so we search in many places but we don't get any good results like that, and Bitlist also doesn't give any good results. For this we have to search through Google or use AI to search which is why we often don't get good results.

I don't know if this is possible, but if a search feature build by users especially for this forum like this through which the forum topics could be easily found using some keywords it would be very helpful. Especially when the exact keywords of the topic are not known.