Message Crawler Integrates dtSearch for Chat-Data Search and Tagging

The Windows desktop application — built by HashtagLegal for litigation support teams handling chat and short-message data — processes Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Cellebrite, Telegram, and dozens of other chat and forensic sources into review-platform-ready load files. “dtSearch handles the search across all of it.”

“Chat data isn't email. People write fast, abbreviate, and swap files via URLs instead of attachments. The search has to handle proximity, fuzzy matching, and the conversational context around a hit. dtSearch gives us the right engine for that.”

Message Crawler integrates the dtSearch Engine to power its keyword search and tagging workflow. The Windows desktop application — built by HashtagLegal for litigation support teams handling chat and short-message data — processes Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Cellebrite, Telegram, and dozens of other chat and forensic sources into review-platform-ready load files.

“dtSearch handles the search across all of it. Message Crawler integrates the dtSearch Engine via the .NET API. End users build a Search Index over the fields they want to query — most commonly message bodies and the extracted text from attachments — and then run keyword searches against the index using standard dtSearch syntax. Proximity, phrase, fuzzy, and wildcard searches are all supported, with hit counts updating live as terms are edited inline.”

Search results in Message Crawler aren't an endpoint; they feed a tagging workflow. A reviewer can paste in a list of dozens of search terms, see counts for each, refine the list, and then tag the matching documents for export or further processing. Tagging works in five modes: tag just the matched message, the family, the entire conversation, the same-day messages in that conversation, or a configurable range of messages before and after each hit. That last mode is particularly useful for chat data, where the meaning of a single hit often depends on what was said immediately around it.

"Chat data isn't email," says Nikolai Pozdniakov, the developer behind HashtagLegal. "People write fast, abbreviate, and swap files via URLs instead of attachments. The search has to handle proximity, fuzzy matching, and the conversational context around a hit. dtSearch gives us the right engine for that — and it's not something I wanted to build from scratch."

HashtagLegal builds desktop and Relativity applications for litigation support and eDiscovery teams. Its lineup also includes BatchGuru (mass operations and exports inside Relativity), EDD-Toolbar (an Excel add-in for eDiscovery work), Redaction Toolbar (native Excel redactions), Production Studio (production prep for any review platform), and AdminPro, a free Relativity admin toolkit. More at hashtaglegal.com

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