How Poliscope Made All of Germany's Local Politics Searchable on One Server with Qdrant

Poliscope makes all of Germany’s local political data searchable in one place, crawling about 4,800 council portals into a single self-hosted Qdrant collection of 130M+ points. Mean end-to-end search time fell from up to 20 seconds at launch to 0.87 seconds, and moving the original vectors to TurboQuant 4-bit cut the collection’s disk footprint by 55%

Poliscope makes Germany’s local political data searchable in one place. Germany has about 11,000 municipalities, and almost every one of them publishes through a council information system (in German, a Ratsinformationssystem). That is where agendas, minutes, proposals, and planning documents get published. Many portals serve several municipalities at once, so Poliscope’s roughly 4,800 active portals cover about 90% of German municipalities and 98% of the population. They run on roughly a dozen software products, each with its own quirks, and none of them talk to each other.