The Advanced Search & Theme Builder

The Advanced Search & Theme Builder enables precise thematic searches of Open Search. As a reminder, Open Search allows you to freely search across our data lake with full access to articles, sentiment analysis, and trending topics. With the Advanced Builder, you can create detailed themes to dive into the data and uncover insights efficiently.

Search Operators

The Advanced Search & Theme Builder uses the operators AND, OR, and NEAR. To help guide you through the creation process, we’ve created an operator menu that shows the available operators as you create your search. A built-in Syntax Helper appears when a query has errors, guiding you through the necessary corrections.

AND operator

Using the AND operator means that only documents with both terms will appear in the search results.

Example:

Lawsuit AND California

OR operator

The OR operator, on the other hand, finds search results containing either term. Please note, if you want to conduct a search using the OR operator only, you can use the simple theme search instead. The simple theme search requires no operators and behaves the same way.

Example:

car OR automotive

Parentheses

Parentheses allow you to group keywords and structure your search more effectively. This makes your search more precise by combining different sets of conditions.

Examples:

  • (personal injury OR wrongful death) AND (employee OR staff OR employees)

This search looks for documents that mention either "personal injury" or "wrongful death" and also mention either "employee," "staff," or "employees."

  • (personal injury OR wrongful death) AND (customer OR customers OR clientOR clients)

This search looks for documents that mention either "personal injury" or "wrongful death" and also mention either "customer," "customers," "client," or "clients."

The NEAR operator

The NEAR operator is used to increase the relevancy of your search by adding a condition on the maximum number of irrelevant words between keywords. The NEAR operator allows you to specify mandatory keywords that should be matched in the document within an x-word proximity. by default the proximity threshold is set to 5)

Format: NEAR ( X, Keyword 1, Keywords 2, …) where:

  • X is the proximity threshold: the maximum number of irrelevant words between any of the provided keywords.
  • Keywords N, are the N keywords that all must be found

Rules:

  • Must include at least two keywords
  • The order of the keywords does not matter

Examples:

  • near(2, show, on) matches both:
    • […] the show must go on […]
    • […] On the tv show […]
  • near(4, method, includes, configuration, instruction) matches:
    • […] method includes accessing a configuration file having instruction […]
  • near(3, method, includes, configuration, instruction) does not match that same text as above, since there are 4 words (accessing, a, file, and having) that separate these defined keywords.
  • As a reminder, the proximity threshold is a maximum. So, for example, the near (4, method, includes, configuration, instruction) results would be included in the search near(5, method, includes, configuration, instruction).

All of the operators can be combined, including multiple NEAR operators.

Save

Once you are happy with your results - save your theme to access it again easily. You can either share your theme with your organization or keep it private.

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