Last updated on March 13th, 2026 at 11:30 am
The 2026 Portuguese presidential election took place between January 18 and February 15. Arquivo.pt collected 2.3 terabytes of electoral content and now provides data on the entire process, such as search terms, identified content, and archived content.
The 2026 Presidential Elections took place in two rounds, the first on January 18 and the second on February 8, followed by a second round in 20 parishes, in the wake of the storms that ravaged the country. Thus, it is expected to find news about the affected areas as well as the political interventions of the presidential candidates in the collection.
Call for community participation in identifying and archiving election-related content
On January 15, Arquivo.pt invited the community to participate in collecting information about the elections: “Candidates’ websites, news articles, opinion columns, or social media posts—everything is useful for representing our life in democracy. Have you found interesting election-related content? Participate in identifying and archiving election-related content.”
Two modalities were suggested:
Arquivo.pt methodology for thematic coverage of the elections
Following the practice adopted in previous elections, the procedure consisted of the following steps:
- definition of search terms
- identification of search engine results pages (SERP)
- phased recording of seeds (starting addresses for crawler use)
- integration into Arquivo.pt
- availability of data set
A search term is a combination of words used in a search engine. For example: candidate_name+presidential_elections 2026+Portugal.
Google was used to identify electoral content, and the Google Rank Checker,Keyword SERP Ranking Tool were also used to extract the results. The limitations recently imposed by the search engine on simple manual searches of results by a user (10 at a time) make this method less efficient.
The recording was phased as follows: before and after the first round, on January 12 and 23, before and after the second round on February 5 and 12, and a final recording of all seeds on February 18.
The result was 2.3 terabytes of data, comprising 11.4 million files, obtained from approximately 34,000 seeds using Heritrix and Browsertrix-crawler.
The contents are archived in the collection with the ID EAWP51 collection and will be accessible on the Arquivo.pt interface after one year. For now, information about searching and identifying content is available.
2026 Presidential Election Data Set
Available on the open data platform Dados.gov:
- candidates’ official websites and channels
- list of search terms
- search results before the first round of elections
- search results after the first round of elections
- search results before the second round of elections
- search results after the second round of elections
- search results after the final in 20 parishes
Find out more about electoral recalls from previous years
- Lists of seeds published at the open data portal Dados.gov
- Data set on the 2025 Local Elections at Arquivo.pt
- Portuguese Legislative Elections 2025 had a special collection by Arquivo.pt
- 2024 European and Portuguese elections in special Arquivo.pt collections
- Collections related to elections: EAWP7, EAWP9, EAWP16 EAWP17, EAWP23, EAWP26, EAWP37, EAWP39, EAWP40, EAWP45, EAWP46, EAWP48
- We archived the Web pages of the Portuguese Parliamentary Elections of 2015!
- We archived the Web pages of the Portuguese Presidential Elections of 2016!
- Cross-lingual collection about the 2019 European Elections is available
- Portuguese municipal elections 2021 preserved by Arquivo.pt
- Cross-lingual research datasets on 2019 European Parliamentary Elections (Use case)
- 2019 European Parliamentary Elections – CoNLL-U texts (Use case)
- 2019 European Parliamentary Elections – Raw texts (Use case)
- Bing Search API script (service discontinued in August 2025)