Run a one-off search from Home

A one-off search answers one question now. You start it by asking Talkscope from the composer on Home, or from any thread in Chats. For a search that keeps running every morning, see Set up a daily search.

Ask in your own words

Type what you are looking for, for example "newsletter writers who cover agency finance". Talkscope plans the queries, reads the pages, scores each creator and saves the ones that fit. An on-demand search is capped at $2 and reads at most 60 items.

Scope chips are hard bounds

The chips under the composer set what a search may touch:

Platforms: web, newsletter, youtube and podcast, limited to the platforms your project allows.
Window: last 30 days, last 90 days, last 12 months or all time.
Widen if needed: off by default.

A search never goes past its chips unless you tick widen if needed. If it does widen, the run trail says so in plain words. If it found itself drifting and you had not allowed it, the trail says that it pulled the search back.

Watch it run

While a search runs, its card on Home counts what it has searched, read, judged, saved and set aside. When it finishes, the card adds where the time went, and the headline tells you how it went, for example Stopped at the cap with 6 creators or This niche is quiet.

A finished run page with its trail, counts and the creators it saved. — Why these, and not the others: every run keeps its trail, including the near misses.

Stop or cancel

Stop (or Esc) ends Talkscope's reply. Anything it already wrote stays.
Cancel run (or ⌘.) ends the search itself. Everything it already saved stays.

Click Why these, and not the others on a finished run to read its full trail. If something looks wrong, Report a problem with this run files a report with the run attached; you can follow it under Reports in Account settings.

What else you can ask

The same composer takes other requests: a brief on a creator, a redraft of a pitch, a change to a daily search, or an edit to your About sheet. Every conversation is kept in Chats, with each step Talkscope took.

A chat thread asking who to pitch first this month, with the steps Talkscope took and a brief listing three creators. — Chats keeps every conversation, with what Talkscope did to answer it.

Some things always need your own click and Talkscope will not do them for you: approving a pitch, marking it sent, merging duplicates, approving a rubric change and do-not-contact.