Manifold Search Documentation
Text searches
Punctuation marks, diacritics, and whitespace in market questions, descriptions, groups, and answers are ignored. Spaces can be used in the search fields to separate different search strings. If you want a character-exact search, put it in double-quotes.
For example, if you search for transwoman
, that will match any of: transwoman
, trans woman
, and trans-woman
. If you search for trans woman
, that will match the same things, plus something like who was the first woman to make a trans-Atlantic flight?
If you only want to match the one-word form, search for "transwoman"
, with the quotes.
Search terms (either individual words or quoted strings) can be negated with a minus sign. Searching for trans -women
will display only markets that include "trans" and do not include "woman". -"trans -woman"
will display only markets that do not include "trans -woman".
The "any" field searches all text that's a part of the market: title, description, and answers. It does not include creator username or groups.
You can click on any username or group in the results table to filter the current search down to only that creator/group.
Numerical searches
Numerical market data can be filtered by range, with multiple ranges separated by commas. For example, you can enter 30:40
in the "percentage" field to see any markets that have a percentage anywhere from 30% to 40%. Single numbers are also acceptable, though note that extremely few markets will be at an exact integer percentage. Leaving one end of the range empty defaults to the max/min; for example you can enter :1,99:
to see any market that's equal or below 1% or equal or above 99%. (You can use "-" in place of ":" as long as it's not a date field.)
Temporal fields like close time and creation time can be entered in the yyyy/mm/dd format. (Or yyyy-mm-dd.) The site will do its best to recognize if you meant day/month/year or month/day/year, but this isn't reliable for dates like "01/01/01", so it's best to stick to year/month/day like civilized people. Blank entries are defaulted to the current interval, e.g. "03/23" means March 23 of the current year, and "10" means the 10th of the current year and current month.
You can also enter a number of time intervals denoted with single letters, to be interpreted relative to the current time, with an optional negative sign to refer to the past. To reference the present, you can enter "0" or "now". For example, if you enter -5h30m:now
into the creation time field, it will display all markets that were created in the past five and a half hours.
Omnibox
You can use the large box at the top of the page to input any combination of filters, with the filter name and value separated by an = sign. For example, you can enter question="Sam Altman" description=OpenAI
, and the individual search boxes will automatically be filled with those values. Different terms are separated by spaces.
The omnibox supports shortened versions of most filters. You can use "q" as an alias for "question", "d" for "description", etc. For overloaded first letters, use the first two; "c" is creator", so "closed" is "cl". If you're unsure what name to use for a specific field, enter it via the term-specific input box in the search options, and you'll see the shortest alias for it used in the URL.
Sorting
You can choose how the markets are sorted with the "sort by" dropdown menu. If you'd like a more complex sort order, select the "mixed" option and then specify how to weight each option. (Weights can be any integer, used to specify the proportional importance of that metric in the final sort order. They can be negative.) For example, if you want to see markets that are closing soon and have probabilities close to 50%, assign weight=1 to close time and weight=1 to probability, and leave the others at 0.
For convenience, you can click on a column title to sort by that column.
Betting
If you enable betting and enter your API key, you can place bets directly from the search page. The site will bet to the probability you input, using a maximum of the amount of mana you input. (Maximum defaults to 10% of market liquidity.)
It uses a limit order rather than a traditional bet, guaranteeing that another bet coming in right after you placed yours will not cause yours to "overshoot" your desired probability. (There is currently a Manifold bug that causes these limit orders to stick around for a few seconds rather than expiring immediately.)
You can find your API key by clicking here and scrolling down to the bottom. If you're concerned about entrusting your API key to this tool, you can limit your potential losses by creating a second account on Manifold, transferring a set amount of mana to it, and inputting that account's API key instead. Also see this market about the likelihood of misuse.
Dashboard
For betting on a set of markets, you can define a custom dashboard. Turn on the dashboard buttons in the visibility options, then add as many markets to your dashboard with the "add" buttons as you like. You can then view only the markets in your dashboard by selecting the "dashboard" checkbox under the filtering options.
Lucrativeness
Each market is assigned a lucrativeness number, which is an attempt to convey a practical measure of how much a trader stands to gain by spending time on the market. It increases with higher market liquidity, higher recent trading volume, and larger and more numerous open limit orders. (Limit orders that are far away from the current market probability are downweighted, since they're less likely to be relevant.) A market's lucrativeness decreases with a higher trader count, since the more traders are involved, the less likely you are to have an edge over the rest of the market.
The intention of this number is to be useful, so if you find yourself
Loading
It will take a few seconds to load all markets when the page first loads, but you can still perform searches in the mean time. (Markets that you're more likely to want to see are loaded first.) Market data is updated live as it changes on Manifold, you don't have to reload the page or repeat the search if you want to see new results.
New market creation and changes to an existing market's probability are reflected within about 20 seconds on average. Edits to a market's title or description will only update after several hours, due to bug in Manifold's API.
Note that every time you load the search page it fetches over 70MB of data, so you probably don't want to do it on a limited mobile connection.
Fancy programmer stuff
Query strings are supported; as you modify your search, the URL will update automatically. You can copy that URL and send it to someone else, and they'll be shown the same search that you're looking at.
If you're using a browser's custom search engine feature, you can specify lucky=true to take you directly to the top result. Chrome and Firefox's custom search engine settings only allow you to enter a single modifiable parameter, so if you want to use multiple fields, you can input the URL string you would otherwise have used as a single "justshoveitallintooneparameter" parameter. For all boolean values, you can use "t" and "f" instead of "true" and "false".
You can perform custom searches using the "custom" field. Enter a snippet of Javascript code that references the properties of the "market" object, and evaluates to true or false. Only markets for which the code evaluates to true will be displayed. For example, entering /^How/.test(market.question)
will display only markets whose title begins with the word "How", and market.question.includes(market.creatorUsername)
will display all markets whose title includes their creator's username.
The full list of market properties is: id, question, description, closeTime, createdTime, slug, liquidity, probability, creatorUsername, groups, answers, lastUpdatedTime, resolution, volume, volume24Hours, totalTraders, and type. Formatting of these properties is as fetched from the Manifold API, with a few modifications to simplify things. (Look at the formatApiData function on that page.) To see a specific example, open the Javascript console on the search page and run currentMarketArray[0]
.
To debug your code, you can open the Javascript console and will see any error messages displayed there. (Only the first error message for each search is logged, the others are discarded.) Note that you can easily freeze the page if you enter a computationally-intensive function; remember it's getting run on potentially tens of thousands of markets. Also, if your function mutates any of the market data, that could break all your future searches. (If you corrupt your local copy of market data, the corruption will persist upon page reload. You'll need to go into your browser settings to clear all site data, then try again. Clearing your cookies will not suffice, you need to clear all site data.) Use this field at your own risk.
Bulk actions
You can edit the groups of all markets in the current search with the "bulk actions" button. If you're editing a large number of markets, it may take a few minutes for them all to get updated; don't close the tab in the mean time. In the event that you have permission to edit some markets but not others, you'll only see an error/success message for the first market. If you want to know about the others, open the Javascript console.
Misc
I add features to this page upon request. You can submit suggestions in this market, or by contacting me some other way. I'm happy to add/change even minor things, I just want to know that someone cares before I bother. You can also contribute yourself on Github.
If you found this tool useful, consider donating some fraction of the mana it helped you earn, to support further development.
