Media monitoring can sometimes feel like pulling needles from a haystack: thousands of new stories emerge daily, making it difficult to quickly and accurately sort irrelevant mentions from breaking news. Boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT are perfect for building precise, complex queries to make sure you get exactly what you’re searching for.
Putting together complex queries may seem like a headache but it’s surprisingly easy to reap the benefits that come hand-in-hand with specific, targeted queries. A well-written query will produce accurate, relevant data, which gives you better insights, helps you to make smarter decisions and will ultimately strengthen your business.
At Streem we are focused on enhancing flexibility, and this flexibility begins with your search terms. Creating personalised Boolean queries means you can get the exact data you want whilst having the flexibility to change these as the news agenda evolves. So let’s get started:
1. AND
“AND” requires the media item to contain both sets of terms. For example, Chocolate AND Milk will find news that mentions both Chocolate and Milk. An article that says ‘I love Chocolate and Milk’ will be found with this query. Remember that AND must be capitalised.
2. OR
“OR” requires the media item to contain either of two terms. eg Chocolate OR Milk will find websites that mention either Chocolate or Milk (a much broader search than the “AND” operator, returning many more results). A media item that says ‘I just went shopping and bought some Milk, bananas, etc’ will be found with this query.
You can also use OR to include variations in the way that brands can be referred to or any common spelling mistakes for brand names e.g (McDonalds OR McDonald’s OR MacDonalds OR Maccas or Maccy D’s or MacDs).
3. “Double quotes”
Double quotes finds media items where the text in the quotation marks appears in that order without any other words in the middle. For example, searching for “chocolate milk” will find a site that says ‘I love chocolate milk’ and ignore sites that mention chocolate and milk separately.
4. NOT
You can easily remove unwanted keywords from your search by typing in “NOT”. Chocolate NOT Milk will find websites that mention chocolate but ignore any websites that also mention milk. As with AND and OR, NOT has to be capitalised.
Most Queries will require some form of exclusions, whether these be irrelevant authors or mentions, or if there are certain types of mentions about the brand you’re just not interested in.
5. ( Parentheses )
Parentheses are used to group terms together, so that operators like AND and OR can be applied to all the terms in the brackets, eg “Chocolate Milk” AND (Icecream OR “ice cream” OR confectionary) will find results with phrases like “Chocolate Milk flavoured icecream” or “Chocolate milk flavoured confectionary”.
Common mistakes to avoid
Curating queries for frequently mentioned brands or ambiguous issues can be a difficult undertaking – misuse of operators or improper testing can lead to irrelevant results, or worse, may exclude relevant results. So we’ve included some common mistakes to avoid when writing queries:
1. Not capitalising ‘NOT’, ‘AND’, ‘OR’, etc. 2. Forgetting to use include quotation marks for phrases, eg Chocolate Milk OR Choc Milk should be “Chocolate Milk” OR “Choc Milk” 3. Forgetting to close brackets 4. Avoid syntax errors: Even when the query is complicated, it is usually best to work off a simple structure made up of 3 parts:
[Main term] AND [context terms] NOT [excluded terms]
Happy Booleaning! Remember, if you run into any trouble, your dedicated Streem Account Manager can curate bespoke boolean queries for you.