The Election History Engine

History at your fingertips

Search over 700,000+ archived posts from /r/politics & /r/The_Donald.

The History Engine was created to preserve the debate before and after the election of 2016. We believe this election was like no other in history, and knew many would try to change reality about what happened, so we archived every post starting 11/2/2016.

This is a powerful research tool you can use to view posts from the election in a unique way, showing both sides of the political divide on one page. Like watching a flower open, this provides a picture into post data otherwise not available, a long time-scale than simply each day. This lets you not only see the two different reality tunnels on the same subjects, you can also watch a narrative in the news morph, change, come and go over time for a given topic, showing data in a way not previously possible.

Example 1: Search for "dossier" and look at the timeline of events as you scroll /r/politics, you can see how the story developed, and the news moved from "allegations", to "dirty" to "credible parts", to "proof". It is so telling to see the content in a different time-frame than just drips.

Example 2: Search for "Puerto Rico" witness the two different worlds of hurricane relief to the island.

Example 3: Search for "classified", "server", "Flynn", "Statue" or "Charlottesville" and see the different reality tunnels.

Tips:

1. Having problem finding something? Use the shortest terms to get the most matches, you will get less results the more specific you are, e.g., "Mika" or "Brzezinski" instead of "Mika Brzezinski".
2. "How do I find my old posts?" A: search by words in the title of your old posts, not your username. The more exact the better. Try one word you used to get the most matches back. We do not store usernames.
3. Use the "Topics" link for easy reminders of terms that may help zero in on your search.
4. Instead of just searching, you can also view posts by day to see history as it was. Example: search for "Date:11/09/2016" Once a day is loaded, you can click 'next' to go day by day or select a day to jump to.
5. You can click an image to enlarge, Also many from early on last year are imgur and dead today so only the smaller archive form is available.
6. Notice the difference in tone between sides over different subjects.
7. Use the checkbox to order results newest posts first.
8. Click "Expand" link over the side you want to focus on, to enlarge the division for wider reading.
9. Click "Show more" link at the bottom of the page when there are more than 100 results.

Known issues:

• Some headlines have long text with no breaking spaces, this will push the view wider for that side. I am fixing these as I find them, so bare with me ;-)
• Some posts have broken images, old sites are gone, user deleted image. (will be replacing them with special icons)
• Missing /r/politics content before Nov 9th.
• You can not search for two terms, (e.g., Dossier, DNC) only an exact match on text as it appears in a headline. I will add the feature to search over more than one term in a future release.

Interface

A - Enter a search term to see results from all days.
B - Check this box to show results with new posts ordered first.
C - View all content for a given day. This does not require any search term.
D - Results from /r/politics will be shown here.
E - Results from /r/The_Donald will be shown here.
F - Links to source and show more can be found in the footer.
G - Topics and link to this page.

Browse Data by Day

- Use the day selector, or text search: "Date:MM/DD/YYYY"
- View all posts for that day from both sub reddits

Browse List of Common Terms

- Use the "Topics" link to access

Browse the Timeline

- Use the "Topics" link to access
- View day content by remarkable events.