The first version of TextQuest called Intext was released in 1988 after porting a PL/1 version from an IBM mainframe to a C version under MS-DOS. In 2024, it was completely reprogrammed for MS-Windows and MacOS.

TextQuest (c) allows convenient content analysis of texts of any length. The text is organised into text units, which can be newspaper articles, book chapters, answers to open questions in a questionnaire or news items in television news. External variables can be used to describe characteristics of the respective text unit. This allows filtering in a later statistical analysis.

Definition of text units and external variables: can be read in from any text and edited in the editor. A maximum of 50 external variables are possible, the values of these variables may be a maximum of ten characters long. How a text unit is defined and which external variables are useful depends on the research question or the hypotheses to be tested.

Vocabularies: are lists of character strings occurring in the text, usually words in the grammatical sense. These lists can be sorted alphabetically or by frequency in ascending or descending order. Certain words
can be excluded, for example articles, conjunctions and prepositions. There are corresponding built-in lists for each language.

Word sequences can also be listed, for example to find terms such as German Red Cross or Technical Relief Organisation.

In the case of word permutations, all words within a text unit are listed in their combination, so you can count their common occurrence.

Different vocabularies can also be compared, even more than two. However, these must be in the same sort order, preferably sorted by alphabet in ascending order. This allows you to determine which words occur in all vocabularies and which only occur in one.

The aim of social science content analysis is to form categories, count them and process the coding results statistically. You can develop a category system yourself on the basis of a vocabulary, but there are also but there are also standardized category systems that can be used immediately and modified if necessary.
The coding results can be generated in two ways:

1. as counters, which indicate how often a category occurs within a text unit
2. Sequence of categories within a text unit

Both files are generated in CSV format and can be analyzed with statistical software.