Bitcoinsearch.io - Search for text embedded in Bitcoin blockchain

[axcelvoid]

Hello Bitcoiners!

I've built a website that allows you to search the blockchain for readable text embedded in transactions.
It's helpful for exploring blockchain history and seeing what people have hidden in Bitcoin over the years.
It works similarly to a search engine, but specifically for blockchain.

Let me know if you find it useful, and if there are any other features you'd like to see!

https://bitcoinsearch.io/

[Vod]

This really isn't project development, but it's a unique idea!   Nice work OP.   I did a few searches but could not find anything - I guess you need to be looking for something to use it.

You may want to consider an API and a service fee for law or crypto recovery firms, but check to make sure they don't already have such tools.

[shinohai]

Finally a brand-new account posting something useful here, instead of the usual investment crap or top seekrit ideas. Nice page OP, especially the additional tor support. and the search works beautifully.

[joniboini]

Cool idea. I searched for some curse words, and I'm surprised by the results. Looks like people like to curse a lot on the blockchain. I noticed in your example, you can put a filter like the block range, but is there a list of filters that we can use? It would be helpful to know it. In addition to that, what about sorting the results? For example, by older or newer blockchain, and so on.

[dkbit98]

This actually worked great with first words that popped in my mind, and it showed results very fast.
It's interesting to see how many information is stored on bitcoin blockchain in textual forum.

Are there any limit in number of characters we can search or any other limitations?

[apogio]

It's a good endeavour.

I was able to find my transaction, when I was learning about OP_RETURN: https://bitcoinsearch.io/tx/2dcd26e9d29f588fa36e343f91094dcbf99b773548715968f447b30858f51ad4

Is the source code available? I'd like to see it.

[joniboini]

I checked the website again, and I found out that you can see the advanced search mechanism if you click again on the search field. Looks like it answers my question above, although it would be better if it's shown directly under the search field. Looks like you can't filter the input based on multiple keywords if I'm reading the tag correctly.

[axcelvoid]

Thank you all for your feedback! And apologies for posting this in the wrong place, I thought that section was the right one.

Are there any limit in number of characters we can search or any other limitations?

As for character limits, I haven't tested it with extremely long inputs, but I'm sure there is some technical limit in place. In practice though, it's unlikely to be something worth worrying about.

One important limitation is related to how the search index works, not every substring can be found. For example, if the text contains:

Code:

text1.somelongtext text2

and you search for 'long', it won't be found. It will only match if you search for 'somelongtext', 'text1' or 'text2'.

This behavior comes from the way the text is indexed and it's similar to how Google and other search engines handles tokenized search. Technically, I could implement searching the text letter by letter without indexing, but with the amount of text data (tens of gigabytes), the query would take minutes instead of seconds.

Is the source code available? I'd like to see it.

Thanks for your interest, I really appreciate it! For now, I'm not planning to publish the source code. A large part of it is shared with some of my other private projects, so I would prefer to keep it private. I hope you understand.

I checked the website again, and I found out that you can see the advanced search mechanism if you click again on the search field. Looks like it answers my question above, although it would be better if it's shown directly under the search field. Looks like you can't filter the input based on multiple keywords if I'm reading the tag correctly.

Thank you for the suggestion! I agree it could be clearer. I'll try to improve the website when I have some time.

[apogio]

Thanks for your interest, I really appreciate it! For now, I'm not planning to publish the source code. A large part of it is shared with some of my other private projects, so I would prefer to keep it private. I hope you understand.

Yeah I do understand, it's your code, it's your choice.
However, when I searched for "strawberries" in your website, I'd like to know if you kept track of my IP and the word I searched for.

[axcelvoid]

However, when I searched for "strawberries" in your website, I'd like to know if you kept track of my IP and the word I searched for.

Yes, requests are logged, which means the IP address and the search query are stored in log files. These logs are automatically deleted after 7 days. I keep this information to monitor for harmful activity, just enough time to detect and fix any attempts to abuse or hack the service by sending some strange requests. If you're concerned about your IP address, you're welcome to use Tor.

[apogio]

Yes, requests are logged, which means the IP address and the search query are stored in log files. These logs are automatically deleted after 7 days. I keep this information to monitor for harmful activity, just enough time to detect and fix any attempts to abuse or hack the service by sending some strange requests. If you're concerned about your IP address, you're welcome to use Tor.

Using Tor will increase my privacy but it won’t help you in identifying malicious activity from specific domains. So for me it’s kinda waste in time if you log the traffic. But again it’s your decision and honestly it doesn’t bother me. I suppose anyone in a public forum should consider their privacy not guaranteed when using a random url they find in the forum.

[axcelvoid]

Using Tor will increase my privacy but it won’t help you in identifying malicious activity from specific domains. So for me it’s kinda waste in time if you log the traffic. But again it’s your decision and honestly it doesn’t bother me.

If someone sends a strange request that causes the service to crash, then yes, the logs help me understand what happened and fix the issue. Without logging, I wouldn't be able to identify the problem at all.

I suppose anyone in a public forum should consider their privacy not guaranteed when using a random url they find in the forum.

In my opinion, people should assume their privacy is not guaranteed on any website they visit, not just random urls from a forum.

[ABCbits]

I tried it a bit and it seems to be decent. It reminds me of another project Project: Preturnio - a full text search engine for Bitcoin, that unfortunately no longer exist.

Our indexing process extracts the complete raw transaction data and attempts to decode any readable ASCII text within it. We don’t limit the search to OP_RETURN fields — the full transaction structure is analyzed.

This is interesting approach, since other search tool usually search for known format such as OP_RETURN or ordinals.

[Vod]

This is interesting approach, since other search tool usually search for known format such as OP_RETURN or ordinals.

It's the equivalent of not taking the meta keywords to describe the page - describe it yourself. 

[joniboini]

These logs are automatically deleted after 7 days. I keep this information to monitor for harmful activity, just enough time to detect and fix any attempts to abuse or hack the service by sending some strange requests.

Will you block VPN IPs too? I noticed that some websites blocked me whenever I used my VPN (some of them blocked my ISP-allocated IPs, too). I guess that's the downside of a shared IP account, but it doesn't feel good to be punished if I'm not the one abusing it. Especially if I'm using a paid account.

[axcelvoid]

Will you block VPN IPs too? I noticed that some websites blocked me whenever I used my VPN (some of them blocked my ISP-allocated IPs, too). I guess that's the downside of a shared IP account, but it doesn't feel good to be punished if I'm not the one abusing it. Especially if I'm using a paid account.

No, I'm not blocking anyone, you're free to use Tor or a VPN. In the future, if the site gets a lot of traffic, I might need to introduce some IP based rate limits. If that happens, you might notice occasional slowdowns or temporary time outs when many users are connecting from the same IP.

I understand the need for privacy, which is why I made the service accessible through onion addresses (Tor). Regarding what I previously said about logging search queries - I was wrong. I thought I needed it for abuse detection, but it turns out I don't. I've already adjusted the code so that search queries are no longer logged at all. I also updated things in a way that should prevent the service from being crashed by unusual or malformed search requests.

[examplens]

Good idea, I was wondering when something like this would come out.
I never researched this before, but now that I look at it, what kind of crap were people putting on the blockchain, and what were they paying huge fees for. I'm glad the hype has died down

[yhiaali3]

That is a truly brilliant and unique idea
I tried it and enjoyed seeing the results, Curiosity seems to be a human trait that is difficult to overcome.

Anyway, I have a few suggestions that might be helpful to improving the user experience:
- Save searches: Allows users to save their favorite queries.
- Share results: A button to share a specific result on social media or via a direct link.
- Interactive statistics: Graphs showing the most popular words or phrases over time.

[@prashant]

Cool idea, the site looks clean and exploring hidden text is surprisingly engaging. A couple of ideas that could take it further are adding keyword trend graphs and some custom export options.