Search Library: Refining My Search with Advanced Features

Document relevance, proximity and more can be used to further limit or sort your search results to your suit preferences

Now that we’ve covered the 3 major pillars of building a search in AlphaSense by exploring the Universe, Voice and Topics of our search, the final step is to further refine with advanced features and filters.

There are a few additional filtering mechanisms that might help you to further pinpoint the information you’re after.

• Proximity: By default, when using two or more search terms, AlphaSense will find mentions of the terms within 15 words of each other. Proximity can be adjusted to meet your research needs. Let’s say you want to answer the following:

1. What is the landscape of free trial offerings in the entertainment industry?

As always, I’ll begin my search with Universe, Voice and Topic in mind. I’ll start by narrowing my Universe to the entertainment industry and search across all documents. I notice there are still hundreds of documents being pulled up, many of which don’t explicitly deal with free trials and I want to see only the documents that speak entirely to my topic of interest.

Using the Proximity window, I adjust my search to ‘Titles Only’ to narrow my results to documents that speak exclusively to my subject, revealing a handful of PR statements focused on Netflix’s decision to do away with free trials.

Search Link.

• Market Cap: AlphaSense will return results inclusive of companies within any market cap, be it private or public. If you have a mandate to return information about companies within a certain market capitalization, it’s as simple as adjusting a filter within the platform. Let’s say I am interested in learning the following:

2. What are the startup funding announcements in the tech industry?

I notice my search results are returning PR announcements from corporate venture teams and want to exclude those mentions. I can narrow down to documents issued by or written about Private Companies with the Market Cap filter.

Search Link.

Time frame: Search results in AlphaSense will automatically display documents issued within the past 12 months. You may need to search further back to uncover commentary from old transcripts or, perhaps you need to monitor real-time news flow and want to focus only on information released within the past week. Let’s say you want to know:

3. What are the latest “return to work” policies and strategies that companies are implementing?

COVID has forced companies to be flexible and pivot strategies with the ever-changing case rates and state-by-state mandates. In this case, real-time information is critical to decision-making, so we’ll want to narrow our results to documents issued within the past 7 days by adjusting the time frame.

Search Link.

• Country of Origin: Documents tagged to companies from any country will be returned within AlphaSense unless otherwise specified. Maybe you need to learn about a new market your company is thinking about entering. Let’s say you want to learn more on:

4. Who are some of the major players in the restaurant delivery space in the US?

After creating my search, I am noticing some mentions referencing international players. I want to narrow my results to only show documents that are issued by or about US-based companies to gain a better understanding of the US market, so I will toggle on ‘US Only’ in the Country filter.

Search Link.

Remember, once you have identified the correct Universe, Voice and Topic of your search, you still may want to further Refine your search. There are many filters available to you within AlphaSense that will enable you to either expand, or contract your results depending on your research needs.