U.S. Politics: What Topics and Which People are Being Searching For in the U.S. Congress?
MetaVid is an open source project from the University of Santa Cruz that allows users to keyword search EVERY word spoken (aka transcript search) on the floors of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate and then listen to the audio and/or watch the video. In this case, the text transcript comes from the closed captioning associated with each file. More on the technology here and searching here. From what we can tell, the index dates back to January, 2006. The MetaVid FAQ is also worth a read. Boolean and other advanced features are available and documented on this MySQL page.
+ Files can be viewed online and download (if desired)
+ Search terms can be set-up an an RSS feed.
+ An advanced search interface is also available
What's New?
The Metavid home page now contains lists of the most popular search terms and most popular people being searched for using their database.
Here's the most current list:
Popular Searches:
* war
* iowa
* Sam Brownback
* 4-11-2007
* April+11+2007
* April 11 2007
* minutemen
Interesting to note (but hardly a surprise) that these top searches are for a single term in a database containing millions of terms.
Popular People:
* Rep. Michael T. Mccaul
* Rep. Peter A. Defazio
* Sen. Jim Demint
* Rep. John Yarmuth
* Rep. Leonard L. Boswell
* Sen. Maria Cantwell
* Sen. Ted Stevens
See Also: Metavid Pages are Also Linked to Congressional Profiles from GovTrack.US.
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