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I built a search engine to index the un-indexable parts of Telegram

42 pointsby alenmangattulast Sunday at 5:12 PM12 commentsview on HN

Comments

Ms-Jtoday at 11:31 AM

Is this only a directory of some Telegram bots?

The title is misleading in the way a person would think you could search Telegram such as: https://oksearch.me/

Search for groups, channels, bots, posts, messages, videos, and images across Telegram.

alenmangattulast Sunday at 5:52 PM

I’ve spent the last 3 months building a crawler to index the public parts of Telegram (https://telehunt.org). The native search is essentially a black box that favors the top 0.1% of bot almost invisible. The Tech: I had to deal with rate limits and the lack of a global 'sitemap'. I’m currently using a hybrid approach of metadata scraping to keep the index fresh. The Goal: It’s an experiment in making 'un-indexable' bot data discoverable.

show 2 replies
titocostatoday at 1:18 PM

Looks cool. Submitting bots fails with "Failed to upload file". Upload buttons for avatar and screenshots fail with the same message.

NooneAtAll3today at 1:40 PM

I thought this would be about private channels

but instead it's simply about bots :/

lovegrenobletoday at 9:08 AM

It's all about Bot directories... (((

hiprobtoday at 8:36 AM

This is cool. Telegram also has a Premium feature which crawls the contents of (presumably) all public channels on the platform. It's limited to 10 searches per day and doesn't search for old content if there are too many retrieved posts.

renegat0x0today at 8:45 AM

- "I built a search engine" sounds cool on hacker news, but in reality it is a "company product", right?

- do the links in the footer work? I tried clicking on github icon, and it appears to be broken

podgorniytoday at 1:11 PM

Meh. Did not find experai_bot via your search tool. Your search even worse than the one "favouring top 0.1%" as does not give any result even by the strict name (unlike default search does).

Good luck anyway. More tools is merrier.

jadengellertoday at 9:47 AM

what do you verify about the bots?

copoitzqlast Sunday at 5:34 PM

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