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Recipes / Find who reported a story first

Find who reported a story first

/search in hybrid mode. The parameters matter less than the reasoning behind them, so that is most of what is below.

The request

GET /search
  ?q=<story>
  &mode=hybrid
  &from=<window start>
  &to=<window end>

# order by published_at ascending

Why these parameters

Deliberately not clustered — you want the individual articles and their timestamps. Sort ascending and the propagation order falls out, including which publishers were rewriting whom.

What comes back

Articles in publication order. The gap between the first item and the bulk is a rough measure of how much of a scoop it was.

How this goes wrong

Trusting timestamps to the second. Publishers stamp articles inconsistently, and some back-date. Treat the ordering as indicative of sequence, not as evidence.

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