It was just this past January that the DOC 2.0 API was extended from searching just the last three months of coverage to searching a rolling window of the past full year of coverage. We're excited to announce today that instead of a rolling window of one year of coverage, the DOC 2.0 API will now search from January 1, 2017 to present, meaning at present you can now search nearly a full year and a half of global news coverage! The rolling window cutoff we formerly used to limit the DOC 2.0 API to the past year of coverage has been permanently replaced with this new fixed starting date, meaning that each week that goes by will increase the search horizon you can explore!
This additional search window opens up a lot of new insights when searching over time. For example, searching for "theranos" in the past would show little coverage from May 2017 through this past March, since the major bursts of 2017 coverage were all in the January-April period. Running the same search for "theranos" now shows these earlier spikes, yielding a much better understanding of how coverage of the company has evolved over time.
As we continue to expand the search timespan for the DOC 2.0 API, we've made one minor adjustment – other than the timeline modes, we've now limited the other output modes to just consider the last 3 months of the specified search window. Thus, if you run the API in "articlelist" mode with a one year timespan, you won't get the top articles from the full year, you will get the top articles from just the most recent three months of the search window. This is partially to reduce computational load, but also because we heard from many of you that you wanted to prioritize more recent coverage in your searches. To see the older coverage, you can of course choose a more narrow timespan (or zoom into a particular area of the timeline when using GDELT Summary).
Finally, we're excited to release several major updates to the DOC 2.0 API's HTML outputs that should considerably optimize their performance on mobile devices. While most of these changes are under the hood, one major user-facing change is the format of the ArticleList output mode. The original formatting of this mode had remained largely unchanged since the very first 1.0 full text search API back in December 2015. The interface was not at all mobile friendly and we've been hard at work updating it to a modern design aesthetic and underlying mobile-first construction, as well as to bring it more into line with the more advanced ArtGallery mode in terms of the visual metaphors it uses and informational elements it offers. This design is now complete and you will see the new design from here forward.
We're very excited by these new capabilities and can't wait to see what you can do with them!