Searching Daily Kos with election tags (etags)

(From the diaries -- kos)

Last week I did some data mining for election tags (etags) and found the labels we've been using to keep track of all the contests of interest. Or at least most of them.

This week, we've added etags to search. For example, you can now search using election tags as follows.

etag=CT-SEN or etag="CA-LT. GOV"

More explanation at the usual search page, but for now you'll do fine if you only use good election tags (more on that in extended body), only one per search, and remember that etags with embedded spaces need to be quoted. Also note you'll need to scroll down a bit to see any results!

Good searching.

Good etags

An acceptable etag starts with a two letter postal state abbreviation followed by a hyphen and a race designation; either a house district number or a statewide office abbreviation (SEN, GOV, Lt. GOV, SOS, etc). There is one exception, etag="2006 ELECTION".

Furthermore only etags previously found as a tag of an existing diary or by in one of the election roundup diaries are accepted.

Election search works by using the etag to build a more complicated query that looks in tags, title, or body text (stories/diaries) or in subject and comment text (comments), but excludes certain meta dairies, including open threads, jotter's daily lists, sidinny's election roundup, and the top comments diaries.

My hope is that searching by etags will help throughout the week and on through election night.

For those who have to know, these are the latest top races, as measured by number of diaries matching the corresponding etag in either Roundup diaries or diary tags over the date range Aug 20 to October 30, 2006. The races are sorted by total number of diaries.

rank	Race	total	Roundup	KOS DB
1	CT-SEN	1187	202	1103
2	2006 ELECTION	1048	390	678
3	VA-SEN	658	322	505
4	CA-50	264	25	256
5	TN-SEN	263	122	236
6	PA-SEN	230	66	202
7	CA-11	200	69	192
8	NY-20	192	43	190
9	CA-GOV	189	53	166
10	MT-SEN	180	34	169
11	IL-14	167	66	143
12	MI-GOV	166	109	125
13	MD-SEN	160	56	141
14	MO-SEN	158	59	126
15	NY-29	154	56	150
16	OH-SEN	142	29	127
17	CA-04	135	50	129
18	NH-02	134	46	129
19	FL-16	125	55	92
20	NY-19	123	61	123
21	RI-SEN	120	32	109
22	PA-07	110	40	100
23	WA-08	109	46	101
24	IL-06	109	38	105
25	NV-SEN	106	27	99
26	NJ-SEN	106	43	85
27	IN-06	105	32	100
28	NC-08	103	33	99
29	MA-GOV	93	63	71
30	CT-04	93	30	86
31	TX-22	92	7	90
32	OH-18	91	22	85
33	WA-05	88	31	86
34	OH-GOV	88	33	74
35	PA-08	87	24	83
36	AZ-SEN	86	25	78
37	NM-01	83	31	79
38	MD-GOV	81	28	72
39	VA-11	79	46	76
40	FL-GOV	79	33	72
41	CO-05	78	23	78
42	WA-SEN	77	19	68
43	AZ-08	77	14	74
44	NY-03	76	33	72
45	NC-11	75	31	71
46	CO-06	75	21	75
47	NJ-07	74	29	67
48	OH-02	73	26	70
49	NY-13	71	52	70
50	VAR-SEN	67	67	0
51	MN-02	67	35	58
52	NY-25	65	22	65
53	NY-26	64	35	50