Limits of the ChatCrawler search index
ChatCrawler is a search engine for public Telegram: it discovers public groups and channels, crawls their open feeds and indexes their public posts — the way a web search engine indexes open websites. Below is what the index covers and where its limit is.
Data source: the official Telegram APIEvery record comes from the official Telegram API and only from venues anyone can open without an invitation.
The index holds only what Telegram publishes itselfThe venue title, the username, public posts: the venue title, the username, public posts. No phone numbers, no passport data, no home addresses, no payment details.
Open Telegram onlyThe index is built from venues anyone can join. If a venue needs an invitation or a sign-in to read, it is not in the index.
The crawler reads what any person can seeCrawling covers open feeds available without logging in. Anything behind privacy settings or a sign-in stays outside the index.
A catalog of what is publicThe index is a catalog of what is public: a snapshot of open feeds as of the crawl. It holds no location data and reports no activity of any single author.
No biometricsFace recognition and biometrics of any kind are not part of this project.
Search access onlyThe product is a search result for a single query. There is no bulk export of profiles.
An honest limit. Username history is reconstructed from the public posts the crawler managed to index. If a person never posted publicly, there is no history. A venue nobody ever opened publicly is one we have never seen. Coverage equals what the crawl managed to read: the index covers open Telegram, and only that.
If a page about you is unwanted
A venue or a card can be removed from our results — message @chatcrawler_admin_bot with the link. More on the removal page.