Type: Ajax Widget
Description: Does a text search on several sites: The Sunlight Foundation, Congresspedia, Center for Responsive Politics, GovTrack.us, and Insitute on Money in State Politics.
Screenshot:
There are two parts: a searchbox
that pops open a results window:
Detailed Description: Sunlight Seekr does a simple search all five sites; unfortunately, however, it is unable to do a deep search on each site. APIs seem inevitable for this data, but not all the sites we wanted to include have APIs yet. For example, our SunlightFoundation.com, running on drupal does not have proper API for search. Until APIs are further developed on these sites, Sunlight Seekr aims merely only to do a simple search on each site.
This is a first atttempt to tie together the data from several sites in the politico non profit arena with a single tool. We were eager to try it even though we knew it wouldn't be perfect. Please be patient and treat this as work in progress. Having said that we hope that Sunlight Seekr is useful even at this early stage. Already we have been surprised at some of the results that have turned up.
- Sunlight Foundation: the Sunlight Foundation does not provide an API for its search functionality. Consequently, Sunlight Seekr is scraping the search results. On the top right of The Sunlight Foundation home page is a small search box. We are scraping the first page of results that would come from a search using that box. When a multi-term search term in is entered into that search, it appears that Sunlight Foundation is doing an OR search. Consequently, the results brought back are likely broader and less useful than one would expect.
- Congresspedia: Congresspedia does not provide an API for its search functionality. Consequently, Sunlight Seekr is scraping the search results. On the left side of The Congresspedia home page is a small search box. We are scraping the results that would come from a search using that box. Congresspedia's search does not appear to search terms of 3 characters or less.
- GovTrack: GovTrack provides a simple billsearch API. The API call is searching the current congress only (109th) but is searching both chambers (House and Senate) and bills at all statuses (introduced, passed, signed etc.). Again, searchterms such as zip codes may be irrelevant in the context of GovTrack's database and may not return many results.
- Institute on Money in State Politics: IMSP has a very well developed and documented API for which they should be proud. For this first iteration of Sunlight Seekr we decided to call two API methods: candidates.list.php and contributors.name_search.php. However, we do plan to call additional methods (most likely their contributors.name_search) in future versions.
- Center for Responsive Politics: The Center for Responsive Politics very generously developed a specific search API for Sunlight Seekr. For this we are very grateful. We aid their API call by providing hints about what we think the searchterm might represent. Thus, we check whether the search term is a five-digit zipcode or a known representative. If it is one of those types then CRP runs a specific zip or candidate search otherwise they run a more general search. If the query is a zip code they return a slew of data on a profile of the zip code, a list of contributions for that zipcode, whether that is one of the top contributed-from zipcodes, the top congressional recipients of Funds from that zip code and so on. For name searches it returns profiles of members, donors and lobbyists that match that name, as well as personal assets, travel and political action committees.
Use: Type a search term into the results box and hit enter. A window will popup with a single tab with a progress bar.
A search term may be a single word, such as "Clinton" or a five digit zip code, say "20815", or a multi word phrase which might be a name of a person, say "Hillary Clinton" or the name of a company "Philip Morris". We place no restrictions on the nature of the search term. However, keep in mind the nature of the sites that Seekr is searching—some search terms may completely out of context within some sites.
As the tool works and searches the sites and brings back results, new tabs will appear. A results tab only appears for a site if the site searched brought back results on that search term. When all size sites have been searched the progress tab will disappear leaving one or more tabs that have results, or an alert that there were no results on any site.
Click on a tab to show the results for that site (you can do this even if not all sites have been searched.) Clicking on any html links within the results will open a new window or browser with that html page.
Installation:
A beta version is currently located here [see the top left of the page].
To install this on your site, we are asking nicely that you register with us. We are doing this only so that we can keep track of just how many different sites are using the tool. The registration is very simple and will just take 30 seconds of your time. We will not bombard you with emails or share your details with anyone else.
To install Seekr on your site, simply include the following code in your page. Sorry that this is an iframe which is far from ideal but it does work
<iframe src="http://sunlightlabs.com/widgets/seekrwidget/searchboxonly.html" width="180" height="180" scrolling="no" border="yes" FRAMEBORDER="0"></iframe>