Profound features a powerful and customizable search engine that helps you target the exact
information you need.
Let’s take a closer look at how it works.
There are multiple ways to search for market research reports on Profound.
A quick and easy method is by browsing.
You can search for reports by industries, locations, and publishers.
Industries and locations may be sorted by category or by alphabetic index depending
on your preference.
Profound supports searching using Boolean terms, phrase searching, proximity searching,
and filters.
To search for more than one keyword, simply add a space between words, or insert “and”
in all caps between words to include all the keywords in your search.
If you’d like to return documents that contain at least one of your keywords, insert “or”
in all caps.
To exclude terms from your search, you can place “not” in all caps at the beginning
of the term you don’t want to be included.
Sometimes you need to search for a phrase containing a string of multiple words.
To search for exact phrases, add quotation marks surrounding the phrase.
Wildcards are a useful tool in searching for words that may have multiple spellings within
a document.
Simply type an asterisk right after your search term to include results that contain the word
with multiple letters after it.
Profound’s search engine automatically includes plurals, alternate endings, and synonyms,
so wildcard searching may not be necessary.
The search engine is also not case-sensitive.
You can use parentheses to group words or phrases.
Terms in parentheses will be searched first and then combined with your other terms.
The NEAR and ONEAR functions may be used to restrict the document result set to documents
that have terms within a certain distance from each other.
For NEAR, the order of the search terms doesn't matter for the matching, only the distance.
ONEAR specifies the exact order for your search terms to match.
Any number of terms may be combined with the NEAR and ONEAR operators.
A default term distance of 4 is used if the distance N = is not specified.
The "Show more filters" section of the Profound search page is a taxonomy browser and indexing
system that can be utilized each time you run a search.
Search terms act as a filter against the library of reports on Profound.
Use search terms to look up and select Industry, Company, Location and Publisher criteria to
include in your search.
The Profound search allows you to browse a list of terms if needed.
Simply begin typing and a list of matching criteria will be displayed for your selection.
Filters are connectors that can be used to narrow or broaden your search criteria, as
required.
“Any of” will search on any of the terms you select.
This filter broadens a search.
The more terms strung together, the larger the search result pool.
“All of” means that all terms selected must be applied to the report.
The more terms strung together, the smaller the search result pool.
“None of” results in documents that do NOT contain the terms in this filter.
Once you’ve determined which search terms you want to use, you may use the provided
filters to narrow your results.
Choose between the publishing date, how the results are sorted, and “sections available”
which indicates whether the reports are sliceable.
Are the search terms you’ve used effective in finding what you’re looking for?
Share the search with another user by clicking on “Share This Search” on the left.
Profound generates a URL that can be distributed via e-mail to other users with a Profound
login.
You can save the search for later use by clicking “Save This Search.”
You will be prompted to name your search and decide whether you’d like to set an alert
which will automatically send you links to new reports that match your save search criteria
as they are loaded into Profound.
When you set an alert, Profound will run an automatic search at the frequency you choose
and e-mail you the results.
To the left of the screen you can manage your searches.
Click on “manage saved searches” to see a list of your searches as well as the options
you have selected for them.
You can edit the alerts for each search by changing the number of titles displayed, delivery
frequency, and format.
Thank you for watching this video.
If you’d like to get a more in-depth look at Profound’s features, watch the other
tutorial videos in the series.
If you have any questions about Profound, please contact our customer support center
at profoundsupport@profound.com.
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