PORTAL ADVANCED SEARCH TECHNIQUES

The search tool within Hanzo's Portal is very powerful, and can be used to really dig into the captured content. The standard filter will show captures that were performed at a particular date range and site. Once that filter has been added then the search window at the top of the screen can be used to find text that was found in those displayed captures.

Whilst this is useful and for the most part sufficient to find a capture or captures with regards to social media captures it does not quickly reveal all of the data contained within. Therefore, there are several functions that can be called within the search bar to find this extra information. For example; social media captures are enabled with metadata tagging specially created for these kinds of search queries.

Say we had a Facebook or Twitter capture and wanted to find posts within those capture(s) that were made at a specific time. A Facebook capture may contain 1000 days worth of timeline activity but if the posts submitted in March of in 2015 were the only parts of interest then there's no need to manually go through all the captures to find the one(s) that has the content required.

SO, HOW DOES IT WORK?

For Facebook there a several metadata tags that can be included within a search to filter them further.

These include:

• meta_authorurl - Author URL

• meta_commentauthor - Comment Author

• meta_posttimestamputcYMDHMS -Year/Month/Day/Hour/Minute/Second

• meta_posttimestamputcISO - As above but in ISO time format (such as 2015-07-20T23:11:47)

• meta_postauthor - Post Author

• meta_likeauthorurl - Like Author URL

• meta_author - Author (name)

• meta_likeauthor - Name of who liked a post

• meta_commentauthorurl - URL of whomever commented on a post

These tags can be used to find this granular information. For example; I want to find posts within a capture that happened at a particular time.

In the search bar at the top of the screen enter meta_posttimestamputcYMDHMS: followed by the date & time of the post to find, this could be 20140210232941 (so meta_posttimestamputcYMDHMS:20140210232941) where a post on the 10th of February 2014 at 23:29 and 41 seconds would be displayed.

Now it's unlikely the exact time is going to be known in advance of a search so there's no need to be so granular, the year, month & day is probably going to be enough. Therefore typing meta_posttimestamputcYMD:20140210 would filter the results to just the 10th of February 2014.

Alternatively, wildcards (*) can be used: A search for meta_posttimestamputcYMDHMS:20140210* would give show the results for the specific Year/Month/Day specified but would include any Hours/Minutes/Seconds found. The wildcard can be used to substitute any value where a range of values is acceptable. For example, I'm interested in finding Facebook posts that were made in 2014, any month but only at 11PM at night. Searching for meta_posttimestamputcYMDHMS:2014**23* would find all captures that fit that description. The two ** after 2014 replace the value for Month & Day. Simply substitute a value for a wildcard when ever a range of values is to be included in the search results.

USING MULTIPLE SEARCHES USING A SINGLE SEARCH QUERY:

Again, say I'm interested in Facebook posts that were made in March 2014 that included the text string 'live' Enter meta_posttimestamputcYMDHMS:201403* AND live into the search bar to filter the results as required.

By clicking on Show Info on a capture it will show its text content as well as the metadata available, this will look similar to this:

By using combinations of metadata searches to find posts made at a particular time that contain certain text strings it's possible to quickly drill into the archive of captures and find the page of interest which can be viewed as a webpage or PDF as normal.