Show SN: Preturnio - a full-text search engine for Bitcoin \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Show SN: Preturnio - a full-text search engine for Bitcoin

27.6k sats \ 30 comments \ @preturnio 26 Apr 2023 bitcoin

Hi Stacker News!

I'm excited to share my new project Preturnio (https://preturnio.com) - a full-text search engine for Bitcoin. With Preturnio you can search for text inside every OP_RETURN, Coinbase transaction and ordinal transaction since the genesis block (block 0).

Block explorers can search for transactions, blocks and addresses but searching for arbitrary text is a challenge. Data is stored in the blockchain natively in hexadecimal format and not easily readable by humans. Preturnio solves this with an easy-to-use search interface. Just enter the text you’re looking for and Preturnio will return highlighted results found in any OP_RETURN, Coinbase or Ordinal transaction. See when the data was created, which block it was confirmed in and other relevant details.

You can search for anything: source code, names, quotes, brc-20 tokens – any plain text you can think of, you can find in the blockchain with Preturnio.

Share transactions with a direct link or even a preview image. Posting to Twitter will automatically create a Twitter card.

Ordinals are supported! Each inscription can be previewed inline or full screen. We support all transactions encoded with text-supported MIME types.

We categorize inscriptions into two buckets – text and HTML. You can toggle to source code view with a familiar search interface to find the text you’re looking for inside the inscription payload. When you share an inscription, Preturnio will try to include a preview of the inscription whether it’s text or HTML.

Once you’ve found your inscription, you can then search inside it with a familiar ‘Find’ experience to look for specific text. Here’s an example of looking through some HTML code of an inscription:

Searching inside inscriptions is your new ordinal super power 💪. Looking for the receiving address of a specific BRC-20 token? Just search for the receiving address. Here’s an example:

We’re big fans of the Ordinal News Standard - Preturnio detects inscriptions that adhere to the standard and exposes direct links to compatible news explorers to instantly read the news. See an example here:

Don’t trust Preturnio? You shouldn’t - so naturally each search result can be verified with a single click to on one of several public block explorers as well as ordinal explorers for inscriptions. It's also easy to copy the TX ID to verify on your own node.

Preturnio has also cross referenced all transactions against a published list of all known English words (more languages coming soon) so you can browse individual words stored somewhere on the blockchain. This is actually a lot of fun! See an example here:

Check out the docs to learn about other search features supported. Feedback is encouraged and appreciated. Thanks for welcoming Preturnio - now go out there and find some cool stuff buried in the Bitcoin blockchain at https://preturnio.com

Jonathan.

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558 sats \ 1 reply \ @fanis 26 Apr 2023

Amazing tool, well done. Also, love OP_RETURN <> Prertunio animation!

752 sats \ 0 replies \ @preturnio OP 26 Apr 2023

So the back story there is when I started the project last year, I was only focused on searching OP_RETURN transactions - as I got into it I discovered plain text was also stored in coinbase transactions... and then Ordinals got released... but I still loved the name and so I kept it and that's where the animation came from. I appreciate the feedback - I'll let the designer know also :) 🙏🏻. Thank you for the feedback!

216 sats \ 0 replies \ @mf 26 Apr 2023

136 sats \ 5 replies \ @bitcoinscorer 26 Apr 2023

Welcome to @sn. So easy to use and it's fast.

Well done 👍

83 sats \ 4 replies \ @preturnio OP 26 Apr 2023

🙏🏻🫡. That is so great to get that feedback. Performance was always the highest priority. Will be working to make it even faster. Thank you!

163 sats \ 3 replies \ @bitcoinscorer 26 Apr 2023

You're welcome @preturnio. Something in me just wishes the url was preturn.io

465 sats \ 2 replies \ @preturnio OP 26 Apr 2023

OMG how did I miss that??? I have preturnio.io but totally spaced on that one. Great catch - I will grab that and redirect to the site. GREAT call - thank you!!!

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 22 May 2023

Were you not able to grab it? It returns 404 for me: https://preturn.io/

But https://preturnio.com works

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoinscorer 26 Apr 2023

Great

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @handsome_latino 27 Apr 2023

This is amazing. Sent you a small donation. Kudos for building on bear markets.

20 sats \ 1 reply \ @preturnio OP 27 Apr 2023

Wow - thank you SO much ser. This is really appreciated and I'm extremely grateful. As stated all donations will go to hosting/infra costs and egress charges. This means a lot. Thank you again.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @dieselbaby 30 Apr 2023

Very awesome tool. I will be sending a small donation as well, in support of your work.

Let me know if you're in need of any cheap hosting/cloud infrastructure stuff (S3 compatible storage, various remote instances/dedicated remote instances, etc.) I've still got quite the hookup on this sort of stuff from my days running a webhosting company/the connections I retained with people in that industry, always happy to share them with people working on cool stuff especially if it helps you save a few bucks.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 27 Apr 2023

Man this tool is smooth, well done man

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr 26 Apr 2023

very cool, thanks for the detailed post!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @tldr_dead 29 Apr 2023

Preturnio has launched a blockchain search engine for Bitcoin users. Users will be able to look for text within any OP_RETURN, Coinbase transaction and ordinal transaction since the genesis block of Bitcoin transactions. It will return highlighted results found in any OP_RETURN, Coinbase or Ordinal transaction with information on which block it was confirmed in, when it was created and other relevant details. Preturnio has categorised inscriptions into two buckets – text and HTML and supports all transactions encoded with text supported MIME types.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ass 29 Apr 2023

@tldr

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @petertodd 29 Apr 2023

You are missing a lot of text. You should index text in any type of transaction. Not just op_return and inscriptions.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @preturnio OP 29 Apr 2023

Thanks for the comment - can you share an example of a transaction that would likely contain human readable text in a transaction other than an OP_RETURN, coinbase or Inscription transaction?

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @petertodd 30 Apr 2023

For example, you are missing text published by: https://github.com/petertodd/python-bitcoinlib/blob/master/examples/publish-text.py

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @preturnio OP 30 Apr 2023

Example tx?

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @petertodd 2 May 2023

I don't have one handy. But look at https://bitcoinstrings.com/ You're obviously missing a lot.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @preturnio OP 2 May 2023

Ah I'm familiar with this project. Ok so as I understand it this goes through every single TX and looks for ASCII text. If you looks through many of the entries they are actually already indexed by Preturnio - in fact the vast majority so I'd dispute that it's 'a lot'. An initial scan looks like a bunch of transactions in the earlier days where stuff was hidden using a bunch of esoteric techniques but not a high number. I'll investigate this further and see if there's an easy way to categorize those and add them to the index. Thanks!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @preturnio OP 2 May 2023

deleted by author

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @rax0m 28 Apr 2023

preturn.io is available

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @samuelorji47 26 Apr 2023

It's project @sn Preturnio has also cross referenced all transactions against a published list of all known English words (more languages coming soon) so you can browse individual words stored somewhere on the blockchain. This is actually a lot of fun! S

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @DarthCoin 26 Apr 2023

It doesn't work. I search "darthcoin" and show no results. And should. Almost all my guides are registered with OP_return.

997 sats \ 0 replies \ @preturnio OP 26 Apr 2023

Ok this has been fixed.

Note: if you wanted to jump directly to a transaction (your transaction), you can just search for that TX ID and it will take you straight there:

Preturnio returns a result here because there is an OP_RETURN inside that transaction and Preturnio indexes all OP_RETURNs. As I mentioned below, the '/' delimiter wasn't part of the search index regex analyzer - so if you searched for 'substack' you'd see your OP_RETURN transactions - but 'darthcoin' wasn't registering as a match.

I've updated the search index regex and so now 'darthcoin' will return results because the analyzer will include specific words in between '/' and '.'

(Turns out that free form text indexes are tricky to configure :))

Thanks for pointing this out and giving me an opportunity to tweak the index.

126 sats \ 2 replies \ @preturnio OP 26 Apr 2023

Can you point me to a tx that contains the word 'darthcoin' in an OP_RETURN?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 26 Apr 2023

https://mempool.space/tx/f4ec38d78e90208a9ecd45ef3a4559f054f02c1012a0e1ccf7a1299b892a719e and many others from my darthcoin.substack.com

504 sats \ 0 replies \ @preturnio OP 26 Apr 2023

Ah that's inside a URL. The search engine uses delimiters to split out what might be individual items. I'm using . but not / - I'll need to modify the regex filter on the index and that will pick it up. Good catch. Rebuilding indexes takes some time but I'll report back.