4 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With the Search Dashboard
The easiest way for users of our Data-as-a-Service to view and understand their harvested data is through our search dashboard. The search dashboard gives users a way to easily access data in a Google-like interface.
We’ve covered in videos some of the main features available in the search dashboard, but there’s tons of tricks you may not be aware of! We had our Data Acquisition Engineers compile four interesting things you can do with our search dashboard.
1. Long String Searches
Intel analysts and professional researchers know that when doing research, queries to find information can get complex and complicated. Google searches support only 2,048 characters.
One of the advantages of our search dashboard is that even the most complex of queries, regardless of length, can still be created and handled either through the user interface or the rest API. This means that complex queries with thousands of words and hundreds of Boolean operators are no sweat for our search dashboard.
2. Proximity Searches
The search dashboard is built off Apache’s Solr engine This means it supports all the features of the Solr search engine, including stemming and the ability for proximity searching.
Proximity searching allows you to take two terms and create a query that searches if those terms are close or near each other. This often works great when trying to match with people’s names that may be in multiple variations.
Take for example trying to find results for Donald Trump, searching for the term “Donald Trump” as a phrase would leave out many variations (Donald J Trump, etc.). Searching just Donald Trump would give back too many results that contain either the word Donald OR Trump, so you need something different, the proximity search.
The syntax for proximity search is pretty easy: “X Y”~Z. In this case where X and Y are the words you want to search near, and Z is the number of words that can be in between. For example, to search for Donald Trump within three words of each other, the query would be: “Donald Trump”~3.
3. Saving Searches
Now that we’ve covered two different ways you can make complex queries in our search dashboard, it’s also important to note that you can save those queries. This comes in handy especially when you find yourself searching the same things over and over again. For each query you save, you can apply a label to it by clicking the ‘Save’ button and entering in a label.
4. Viewing Changes
One of the things that our users often forget is how much data we are actually harvesting for them. Each time we harvest a page, it pulls all the text content from that page. This means that if a page has changed since it was last harvested, we store both versions.
Your database that you see may have 8 million unique web pages harvested, but with all the versions and changes could be 30 or 40 million actual web pages. To view changes that are occurring on pages, all you need to do is click the ‘Compare’ button.
Test the Search Dashboard
Want to test out the features of the search dashboard yourself? Request a free trial of the Global News Data Feed Dashboard using the button below.
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