Defining your search purpose

June 7, 2013 Chad Bolender Leave a Comment

When creating a new search, it is important first to understand what kind of data you are trying to find. Newsdesk provides many specialized ways of getting at data, but not all will be appropriate for every type of search. Not knowing what you want ahead of time can lead to unnecessary frustration with the process.

Tight Results

When getting noise (i.e., irrelevant results) in the search results just isn’t an option, you’ll want to use these strategies to create a tight search. This is useful when the search results are being fed directly into email communications or are integrated into an intranet or website. The top priority is relevance and “clean” results. It’s a trade off, however, as filtering the irrelevant results will block some good articles as well.

Getting tight results

The general philosophy of creating tight results is to be increasingly restrictive in adding search terms. This means using exact phrases, Boolean ANDs and multiple filters to winnow out anything that is not a guaranteed match.

Exact Phrases

Exact phrases are multiple words separated by spaces, contained within double quotation marks. For example, here is a simple search using 2 exact phrases:

“Moreover Technologies” AND “media monitoring”

Any news article or blog post that contains both of these phrases will almost certainly be about Moreover Technologies. Using “Moreover Technologies Inc.” would be even more precise, but we’d likely lose even more relevant results due to it being less common. This is an example of the trade off mentioned above.

Headline and START

Another way of ensuring that all search results are going to be relevant to your aim is for the keywords to appear at the beginning of an article. In Newsdesk, this is accomplished by using the Emphasis tab under the Advanced search options:

To specify that keywords must appear in the headline of an article, add them to the Headline Include field. To specify position in the article text, use the Position filter, which tells Newsdesk that the keywords in the main search box must appear within the first X number of words.

Additionally, you can use the START search parameter, detailed here.

Broad Searches

On the other side of the spectrum from Tight Searches are Broad Searches. These are most appropriate for internal communications, research, or in any case where the opportunity cost of missing a relevant result is greater than receiving a bad match.

Creating Broad Searches

The idea is to run a query that is specific enough to be relevant, but loose enough to catch all the articles you want.

Topics

In Newsdesk, a great place to start is the Topics filter. Grouped into broad channels of like topics, there are many pre-built categories available to you. If the topic has to do with agriculture, one useful topic may be “Agriculture News.” This can be used to create a broad search and keywords or other filters may be applied to narrow it down in a particular direction.

Grouping Keywords

The below search takes at least one word from each group. This way, it’s flexible, but also will contain at least 3 specific keywords. The aim of the following query is to find information about the price of agricultural commodities:

(corn wheat alfalfa barley) AND (commodit* ETF bale* bushel*) AND (price prices value)

There is no wrong way to create a search, but it saves time and frustration to think about which strategies may be best before beginning. Tight Searches and Broad Searches are at 2 ends of the spectrum. It’s likely that your searches will fall somewhere in the middle.

What other search strategies do you use?

Filed under: search

Tags: broad search, exact phrases, tight search