Filed under: search
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?
June 7, 2013
What is it?
Moreover recently introduced a new search operator that functions similar to proximity searches (“keyword1 keyword2″~5). You can specify 2 groups of keywords that must appear near each other. You can also set how many words apart they should be.
Example:
(CAT caterpillar) NEAR/10 (tractor construction)
This looks for the words “CAT” or “caterpillar” within 10 words of “tractor” or “construction.”
Why use it?
NEAR is another tool in a user’s toolbox for creating a focused and relevant search. If the combo of Boolean logic and Newsdesk’s filters aren’t providing enough granular control over search results, NEAR may be the answer.
NEAR fills the gap between exact phrases, which may be too strict, and simply using the AND operator, which may be too broad. It allows more flexibility.
Example:
(gold silver copper palladium platinum) NEAR/5 (ETF* “exchange traded fund” stock*)
Using NEAR here saves you the time of writing out “gold ETF,” “silver ETF,” and so on. It also catches cases where an article phrases them in a different order, e.g. “ETFs for gold and silver.”
Nested search:
The NEAR operator can be used within a longer search. Here I’m looking for stories mentioning Les Wexner in conjunction with specific electric car companies.
(“Les Wexner” “Leslie Wexner” “limited brands”) AND ((fisker coda) AND ((car* vehicle*) NEAR/10 (electric green “plug-in” plugin))) NOT (“wexner center” osu “ohio state”)
Go try it out in your own Newsdesk account.
May 2, 2013
Today’s blog post was inspired by a recent conversation between some Moreover employees. My hope is that this post will give you some insight into who we are as a company and why we do what we do.
Numbers Do Lie (or Can Mislead)
Moreover is strong in the Media Monitoring field — our online news coverage is second to none. But why do some other media monitoring brands tout vast numbers of social media sites, compared to our more humble-sounding index?
The answer lies in what information our customers are trying to glean from their research. There is a considerable amount of noise that becomes a distraction (information overload). Effective monitoring of impactful sources is the driving force behind our efforts to grow and maintain pertinent coverage of social media.
Quantity of Data vs. Quality of Understanding
Just like any media monitoring company, we have competing goals. We want more coverage and more data, while keeping the tools that our clients use lightning fast and giving them only the data that helps them solve their needs.
That “only” is important.
Beware the Big
Moreover owns the ping server Weblogs.com. We have access to data of millions and millions of blogs posting content daily. We know where to look if we’d ever want to inflate our numbers, but we won’t.
Instead, we choose a “White List” approach, in which sources are vetted before they make it into our clients’ search results. When our Newsdesk clients run their searches, the data they want is more likely to be at their fingertips, rather than scattered amongst poor quality data.
More data is better only so long as it can be seen and used. Adding more content to sift through can make finding usable content more difficult. Having too much data can be worse than too little when it hinders the discovery of relevant content.
Drawbacks and Trade-offs
Of course the White List approach has its own issues. An important blog may not be covered when it’s needed. And, it makes it harder to track all mentions of keywords across all social media.
To mitigate this, Moreover’s Client Services and Editorial teams work with our clients to add the blogs and other social media that are important to them. This customer-focused coverage expansion process ensures that we provide broad coverage across multiple industries and niches. We also look at our own data for mentions of new sites, while seeking out other high-value sources of data.
A brief note on “full coverage”: With countless blogs being created and abandoned daily, it’s unlikely that anyone has full coverage. It is more accurate to say “less incomplete coverage”.
Pride in our Numbers
Moreover is proud of our 3.5 million social media feeds and our 55,000 online News sources. The number that makes us most proud, though, is our 90%+ customer retention rate. That number clearly shows we are on the right path. And we’ll continue to grow our source list in ways that bring customers value and help them find the data they need to solve their unique problems.
If you’re a Moreover customer and there are sources that are relevant to your needs that Moreover does not monitor, let us know. Our Client Services team will be happy to work with you to get these into our coverage.
November 14, 2012
Every other Thursday we release an update to Newsdesk, our media monitoring and enterprise news sharing service.
We’ve added some great new features based on customer feedback, and we’re especially pleased to introduce a case sensitive search option along with the ability to specify that your search terms must appear within the first X words of the articles.
Here’s this week’s full product update summary:
- Spanish interface: We now have a fully-fledged Spanish interface, which our client services team can switch on for entire accounts or just for individual users. (In due course we will make this an end-user setting so users can control it themselves.)
- New search options: Several new excellent search options on the newly named “Emphasis” filter (previously “Headline” filter) that can really help you zoom in on search terms and boost the relevancy of the results:
- Users can now select if they only want to search within the first X words of the article (first 100, 200, 500 words etc).
- You can now set the search to be case sensitive, so for instance “Shell” will match to “Shell” but not “shell”.
- And you can make the case sensitive search also be accented character sensitive, so e.g. “Nestlé” will only match “Nestlé”, not “Nestle” or “nestle”.
- The headline search options are still there as well of course. Here’s a screenshot:
Newsdesk Media Monitoring new Emphasis filter
- We’re also now showing Twitter user’s pictures (“avatars”) alongside the search results.
- We’ve made it a little easier to select folders when you save a search by showing the tree structure.
- The search results will now show you how old a story is in number of weeks, instead of just “1 month old”, to make it a bit clearer.
- Users can now delete up to a maximum of 2000 articles from a feed. Users can continue to delete stories, but after 2000 the oldest story will be undeleted to make way for the new one.
We hope our customers enjoy these latest updates, and stay tuned for our next release in two weeks time!
November 4, 2011
Since the October release of Newsdesk 4 our engineering team have been busy testing, tweaking and generally playing with things under the hood, adding more functionality to make Newsdesk an essential media monitoring tool.
The latest version now offers the ability to chart multiple feeds across all media types:
Charts can be saved and edited from My Content, as well as being exportable in CSV format. Pick from a variety of graph styles, then click and drag your way around the chart to isolate peaks in coverage and discover all the articles on any given day. This capability allows users to compare and spot trends over a wide range of media types, along with the Moreover‘s comprehensive filters and facets.
It is also possible to add charts to your Dashboard, alongside your other important saved feeds:
All in all we are very excited with the way Newsdesk is shaping up, and expect much more to come as we race into 2011 ready to keep pushing ourselves forward! Drop us any comments below or request a free trial here.
December 8, 2010
Just a quick update to let everyone know the Moreover iPhone app is still going strong, and we’ve just updated the ‘Sport Events’ feeds set with some forthcoming spectacles of sport. Gone are the Ryder Cup and Commonwealth Games, and as we head into winter we’ve replaced them with two events sure to be dominating the back pages over coming months.. The Ashes news, as England seek to retain urn won in 2009, and the road to the Cowboys Stadium for Super Bowl XLV will be covered by NFL Playoffs news.
Download the app here and let us know if there are any events you think we should be covering in the app!
October 26, 2010
Gives users unified portal access to millions of news and social media results daily, cutting-edge faceted search and filtering tools.
Media aggregator Moreover Technologies announces the release of its all-new Newsdesk 4 real-time news and social media discovery, refinement and sharing service. Newsdesk 4 gives users unified portal access to millions of daily news articles and social media posts, and ability to refine results immediately using comprehensive cutting-edge faceted search and filtering tools.
“Users can capture combined news and social media coverage all in one place, then rapidly slice and dice searches in ways that will pinpoint only what they need, and discard the rest,” emphasizes Paul J. Farrell, Moreover Technologies President.
Product Manager Brian Mackie adds, “We’ve focused on the top concerns voiced by clients – ability to easily and rapidly find, process and share information. This SaaS application enables users to drill down fast to the best and most relevant search results, decide if or how to modify them, then share them easily while they’re still fresh and focused on the burning issues of the day.”
Newsdesk 4 previewers have cited ease of use of the Newsdesk 4 dashboard tools, intuitive search capabilities, and fast finding of needed content. Among discussion forum comments are: “…design is real well done,” “…very elegant application,” “…from what I’m seeing, plug and play for us,” and “…you guys are going to do great with this product…It’s a home run.”
Newsdesk 4 meets five major media aggregation aims:
- Provides multiple ways to find relevant content – including faceted search; category filters; source filters; relevance and rank filters, on the fly (e.g., mentions of companies, people, products, events and stock ticker), and pre-canned searches with cross-referencing to enable targeting relevant information without frustrating trial-and-error.
- Unifies the search for both real-time news and social media through a single conduit.
- Captures the depth and breadth of the best read, most highly regarded coverage demanded by the world’s largest companies (2.5 million results daily from more than 1.7 million-plus sources spanning 800 searchable industry categories, 100-plus countries and 50-plus languages).
- Returns clean, spam-free results that have been editorially vetted.
- Offers easy-to-use sharing tools that empower rapid and reliable distribution, including automated newsletters, email alerts and ability to maintain editorial control of feeds shared.
Mackie elaborates, “Search options abound. You can look for headlines, languages, locations, individual sources, and result digests summarized by various criteria which can be further refined. You can conduct very user-friendly Boolean searches. While sophisticated and intuitive, Newsdesk 4 also is simple and straightforward, appropriate for everyone from power users to novices.”
Newsdesk 4′s intelligence-gathering capabilities enhance strategic, tactical and operational decision-making that scales for small and enterprise businesses alike, according to Rossen Roussev, Moreover Technologies’ Vice President, Enterprise Strategy and Business Solutions.
Roussev, former External Intelligence Chief at Royal Dutch Shell, attests that Newsdesk saved his company $5 million in one year, due substantially to consolidating a variety of media monitoring vendor contracts under Moreover Technologies.
He identifies a variety of intelligence-related uses, including ability to: create an early-warning system for threats, identify emerging opportunities, compare performance and sentiments across regions, countries and competitors, refine messaging to help achieve business and communications objectives, and share all pertinent information with the right people through user-friendly distribution channels.
“Newsdesk 4 gives you a myriad of ways to find information you weren’t even looking for – such as negative information that can damage reputation, but has remained off the radar,” Mackie points out.
For more information, contact Brian Mackie, bmackie(at)moreover(dot)com.
October 20, 2010
We hope you’ve all been enjoying our first iPhone app since its release earlier in the year, but with the new football season fast approaching and an autumn full of sport ahead we decided it was the right time to listen to your feedback by updating the app with extra features.
We’ve still got all the sport feeds you’re familiar with but now added the ability to create your own saved searches and customised feeds. So search for your favourite team or niche sport over our categories to get breaking news and latest scores from global sport news sources.
We’ve also added localised menus for US, UK, Global, and Event (think the Ryder Cup, Tour de France etc) focused sport, so whatever your interest we’ve got it covered. Download the app from iTunes here, and as before tell us your thoughts so we can score another app success!
July 30, 2010
Aggregation pioneer marks one-year milestone with new Social Media Metabase portal, expanded news coverage, new search engine tools, new publisher product, new mobile app
Reston, VA—Aggregation pioneer Moreover Technologies has moved aggressively on their mission to solidify the top spot in breadth and depth of social media and news capabilities in the year since a private investment group acquired the company from VeriSign, Inc.
According to company President Paul J. Farrell, investment team leader, “The ink on the May 2009 acquisition contract wasn’t even dry when a product team started expanding our social media and news presence to help our clients monitor what’s happening, identify trends, and use the information to enhance their customer support and marketing services. This was one facet of an overall strategy to address many challenges at once, beefing up combined news and social media monitoring and improving our analytical tools.”
Leading the way is a newly launched Social Media Metabase business intelligence portal with expanded content filtering, sharing and analysis tools. This repository includes 976,000 spam-free, editorially reviewed White List feeds providing 1.4 million average daily posts refined from more than 12 million sources. “We cover all the Web’s most prominent social media sources, commentators and discussions,” notes Product Manager Brian Mackie. “A year ago, the Metabase contained 250,000 feeds, chiefly blogs and podcasts, with 500,000 posts. That’s a 280 percent increase in posts coupled with a 390 percent increase in sources.”
Moreover’s social media universe includes forums, microblogs, consumer review sites, video and photo sharing sites, wikis, social networks and comments, including such key sites as YouTube and Twitter.
The new Metabase portal provides detailed source lists and indexing statistics, giving customers more detailed insight into coverage. Other enhancements include comprehensive categorization and metadata tying to country, language, publishing platform, topic and media type. Quantity of tagged feeds, and countries, languages and platforms covered is constantly growing. Currently, Moreover indexes more than 100 countries and 50 languages.
Also noteworthy is the impending combination of the Social Media Metabase and News Metabase into one portal. “Having the news and social media all in one place will provide clients the ability to understand connections between the content. This shows metrics we can support, analysis of data returned, most linked sources, and the most salient pieces,” emphasizes Mackie.
News coverage also is up considerably, with 218 percent growth in average daily article count to 600,000 from 275,000; and with a 15 percent increase to 35,000 sources.
Farrell notes, “To help fuel our growth, Moreover has more than doubled the size of our client service team, enabling our clients to filter through all the noise and identify the information they are seeking.”
Moreover Technologies’ Search Engine Toolkit (SET) now offers a search API across all news and social media types (versus just news a year ago), offering “direct query access to our index for custom feeds and search implementations,” says Mackie. “It’s fairly plug-and-play, and goes in some pretty fancy directions. We can provide very specific content by topic, news and social classifications.”
Other value-added applications, such as Moreover’s Newsdesk, sit on top of SET. Newsdesk provides an intuitive dashboard that enables access to breaking Web news and fast creation of branded information-sharing tools such as newsletters.
Responding to publisher interest in monitoring and complementing how and where their Web content appears, Moreover Technologies has developed the MetaMonitor content discovery application. MetaMonitor enables publishers to compare and contrast details of original and republished content. “It’s a great analytical tool for publishers,” notes Farrell.
Rounding out first-year accomplishments, Moreover Technologies also launched an iPhone application as part of a wider mobile strategy.
For more information, contact Ryan Roe at salesinfo(at)moreover(dot)com.
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Since 1998, Moreover Technologies has been a trusted aggregator of global news and social media. Through US and UK offices, the firm offers corporate customers worldwide direct access to comprehensive, yet targeted, real-time business and consumer information from the Web’s most read and respected sources. Daily, Moreover Technologies aggregates two million news articles and social media posts from more than a million editorially vetted sources across 100+ countries, 50+ languages and 800+ searchable industry categories (statistics as of June 2010).
June 9, 2010
Respected research and advisory firm for the information industry, Outsell, have taken a look at our new content discovery application product MetaMonitor and been impressed with the way MetaMonitor builds upon the existing Moreover framework.
MetaMonitor serves to allow publishers to track and compare their original content across our ever-growing list of 35,000 news sources and 800,000 social media sources. Publishers can match original work to derivative content, identifying who is using what, how they are using it and where, allowing for fair attribution and the engagement of prospective partners.
What so captivated Outsell was Moreover’s ability to take our core offering, the News Metabase, but with additional development time to productize it in a fresh and different manner, adding value with a targeted product extension. Outsell subscribers can read the full article here: https://clients.outsellinc.com/insights/?p=11193 and we look forward to sharing more exciting product news with you all soon!
May 17, 2010
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