How to search for data on Arweave

As we all know, Arweave is a decentralised storage platform that aims to provide secure and permanent data storage service for global users. Unlike traditional centralised storage services, Arweave stores data on the blockchain, which ensures permanent data storage and transparency.

In addition, Arweave also provides some innovative features such as the miner rewards mechanism and web applications on the blockchain. Through Arweave, users can manage and share their data more freely without the risk of data deletion or tampering.

With the increasing improvement of decentralised storage ecology, users have created more demand for access to data. How to effectively aggregate decentralised data and perform unified retrieval and query has become the concern of all.

But that’s not the problem. The Arweave ecosystem offers a variety of data search tools, which provide various features to cater to the needs of different user groups.

In the past, users usually chose ViewBlock — a block explorer and data retrieval tool tailored for the Arweave ecosystem. ViewBlock’s main strengths include its comprehensive database, fast data retrieval, and user-friendly browsing experience. It provides users with features such as data filtering, transaction tracking, and wallet management. Meantime, ViewBlock handles various data types, with a focus on transactional data and information related to Arweave’s decentralised storage.

Arweave GraphQL is also a good choice. It is a GraphQL API based on Arweave blockchain technology, allowing users to query and manipulate data on Arweave blockchain through the GraphQL language. It supports retrieval of multiple data types, including text, images, videos, etc. Unlike ViewBlock, it is geared more towards blockchain developers.

In addition to ViewBlock and Arweave GraphQL, there are a number of other data search tools in Arweave ecosystem:

SonAR — a data indexing solution designed to provide powerful search capabilities for the Arweave ecosystem.

GeniiData — a data visualisation and analytics tool that aims to make the Arweave ecosystem more accessible and usable.

Permaweb Index — a search engine and directory designed specifically for the content hosted on Arweave Permaweb.

All of these data retrieval tools are good choices for Arweave users. However, as the Arweave ecosystem continues to improve, users have created a great demand for a more efficient, flexible, and easy-to-use data retrieval tool for both data access and a better product experience.

Thus, a search tool developed by Adot team and based on the Arweave ecosystem was born, which aims to provide a full-chain data retrieval service for developers and users of Arweave ecosystem.

Adot completed the search function for the full data of Arweave within about two months. The product has these features:

Tag search- Search for certain terms in tags of all transactions, including layer1 and layer2 transactions.

Full-content search- It indexed content in all transactions and made them searchable.

Structure parsing- It defined rules for top dApps and converted the original json of each transaction to unified structure. These structured texts of their transactions are then used for search and AI.

AI labeling- It applied AI technology, i.e., sentiment analysis, to generate labels for each parsed transactions of top dApps, such as mirror.xyz and lenster.xyz.

Users can search Arweave data and filter the results using ar tags or sentiment tags.

What’s more, it is not only a standalone data retrieval application, but also can be integrated into any Web3 project using Arweave storage, which not only provides a powerful search function for developers in the Arweave ecosystem, but also enhances the product experience of users when using different types of dApps.

Not long ago, Adot announced a partnership with WeWeave. WeWeave is a content storage, retrieval, creation, sharing, and tipping platform based on the Arweave permanent network, initiated and developed by the PermaDAO R&D Guild, and is also one of the projects incubated by PermaDAO.

By integrating Adot into WeWeave, users can not only browse their own uploaded data, but also easily access any files and content stored on the Arweave network. Besides, Adot will also provide filtering, tagging, and other functions for WeWeave users’ search results, making it easy for users to classify the data they need.

Although this feature has not yet been released, this is a successful integration of decentralised storage and search, and a positive attempt to open up the flow of decentralised data and connect the upstream and downstream of the data track. Such an outstanding product cooperation use case will also bring more data-level application thinking and cooperation opportunities to other types of developers in the Arweave ecosystem.

In the Arweave ecosystem, data retrieval tools like SonAR, GeniiData, ViewBlock, Arweave GraphQL, Permaweb Index, and Adot offer various features and advantages to cater to the needs of different user groups.

Users can choose the most suitable tool according to their requirements for data types, functionality, and level of customisation. Collectively, these tools contribute to a more accessible and user-friendly experience within the Arweave ecosystem.