Search Library: Understanding My Search Universe

From queries pertaining to a single company to a broad industry search, learn to narrow your results based on a defined audience

Whether you’re looking for a precise piece of information about a company or are on a voyage of discovery and learning about a topic for the very first time, AlphaSense is built to flex alongside your differing research needs.

By default, AlphaSense will search across all documents and serve up results pertaining to any company. This can be particularly helpful when you’re trying to answer questions or monitor updates pertaining to a broad theme or answer big picture questions like:

1. Which companies have discussed developing or releasing products in the 5G space?
2. How can I monitor news flow pertaining to electric vehicles?

While running a broad thematic search will help you generate new ideas or understand a landscape, if you’d like to narrow your results to a smaller, defined set of companies, there are 3 ways to limit the Universe of companies you’re searching.

• Industry Filter: If you’re looking for results pertaining to companies within a specific industry, the best place to start is the Industry filter. Based on GICs classifications, the Industry filter also includes subsectors to help you get even more granular results. To add to flexibility, you can easily toggle one or more industries or sectors to perform your search.
• Watchlist: To see how a particular group of companies is thinking about a topic or building strategy around a theme, a Watchlist is the best place to begin your search. We suggest creating Watchlists for any group of companies you’d like to perform searches across more than once, such as your competitors, suppliers or even your key customers. You can edit Watchlists at any time and you can even share your Watchlists with fellow AlphaSense users.
• Ticker Search: When you’d like to pinpoint your search results to documents issued by or about one single company, use the Ticker Search bar. While this search bar is flexible and allows you to expand your search by adding more than one ticker, if you’re searching across multiple companies consistently, we’d recommend you make a Watchlist as described above!

Pro Tip: To exclude companies from your search, type a minus sign before the ticker in the Ticker Search bar and you will remove all documents in your search results that are tagged to that company. More on that here.

Now, let’s try it out. Say you want to answer the following questions:

1. What are the management changes of companies within the Information Technology industry?

This question is centered around an industry, so you’ll want to begin your search by using the Industry Filter and toggling to ‘only’ Information Technology. When you run your search, you’ll see all documents mentioning management changes within your Universe of the Information Technology space.

See the search.

2. What are the management changes at Amazon?

You’ll be using both of our search bars in tandem for this search. To begin, you’ll want to add Amazon’s ticker to the Ticker Search. Now your results will be limited to only documents issued by or about Amazon.

See the search.

Over these 3 searches, you narrowed your results from hundreds of thousands of documents to just a few hundred results. By focusing on your search Universe, you’ll be more efficient in your research and able to access precise information, with ease.