Telemetry: Best Practices

Telemetry empowers you, the user, with the ability to search across a massive repository of Telegram data. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and one of the most common questions that we receive is how to best utilize Telemetry for maximum value.

In this article, we’ll review some general best practices for Telemetry and show you a few industry-specific use cases along the way.

Multilingual Searching

One of the huge upsides of Telegram data is that it’s incredibly popular globally. This can provide you with diverse and new findings and insight into your topic of choice.

There are hundreds of millions of users in every region of the world imaginable, posting and uploading content in Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Persian, Hindi, and countless others.

When searching in Telemetry, be sure to not only search in English or your native language, but to search in multiple additional languages as well for maximal results.

You can also search in multiple languages in the same query, which takes us to our next best practice: Boolean logic.

Boolean Logic

Boolean logic is a simple form of logic used for searching. Boolean logic is based on operators, and Telemetry supports the leading ones as shown below. Note that while we’ll refer below to post searching, the same rules apply to channel and group searching as well.

For a full explanation of each view our product page and click on the down-facing arrow to expand each operator:

With Boolean logic, you can create queries that cover multiple keywords to save time and search credits while also expanding our results.

This is especially critical for anyone interested in searching a specific topic, event, or entity for maximal results. For example, one could search various brands in a query for digital marketing, keywords for news events, and more.

Instead of searching for, let’s say, “News”, you can expand that query by adding additional keywords, for example: News OR “Current Events” OR Urgent.

This query will search for any post that has the words “News”, “Current Events” or “Urgent”. Note that the quotation marks around “Current Events” will search only for an exact match of the phrase “Current Events”, not “Current” by itself or “Events” by itself.

We can take this further by searching for nested queries. For example, searching for China AND (Singapore OR Malaysia) will search for any post that has the words China and either Singapore or Malaysia mentioned in it.

See an example retrieved below from the Chinese state media agency Xinhua mentioning both China and Singapore:

The same search also retrieved an additional post from Xinhua, this time mentioning China and Malaysia instead of Singapore.

There’s more that we can do as well. With Wildcard searches, implemented by searching with an asterisk (*), we can search for ANY value that matches the query.

For example, searching for .com would search for any result ending in “.com”, and searching for bc1 would search for any value beginning with bc1 and ending with any value of any length. This is effective for any form of cryptocurrency research, for example - searching bc1* would find Bitcoin wallets as shown below:

It can also be used effectively in cybersecurity research to find mentions of email addresses, domains, hashes, or any other datapoint that has a recurring structure.

Finally, we can exclude keywords. Occasionally, you may run a query in Telemetry that retrieves multiple duplicate or irrelevant results.

Alternatively, you may want to focus your search by excluding keywords. For example, if you’re uninterested in a certain entity showing up in your results, you can exclude it via the “-” operator.

Searching for “News -Elections” would retrieve any post with the keyword news in it, excluding those that also mention elections.

There are additional best-practices for Telemetry as well. Let’s move on to the next topic: Source Development.

Source Development

Telemetry is a massive database, but sometimes you’ll still need to go directly to the source for to-the-second live updates and more. Developing a broad source array on Telegram usually takes significant time for professionals of all kinds, but with Telemetry you can quickly find many sources.

Telemetry’s channel and group search feature, alongside the message search feature, enables you to find relevant sources on Telegram at a much larger scale than what Telegram enables you to find manually.

When you do find relevant channels and groups on Telemetry, you can also use one of our main features to find even more relevant groups and channels.

Below we have a sample of several channels mentioned in the “Russia Today” channel, a Russian state media Telegram channel. We can see that an additional RT channel was mentioned, as well as a channel or group called “ASEAN NOW”.

If we were researching Russian state media and propaganda or any other relevant topic, this would be quite useful for us, as otherwise we’d have to manually crawl through every post or message uploaded to the group to find mentioned groups and channels.

From here, you’ll need to start using the Telemetry API for additional advanced features, which we’ll cover in a blog post soon.