Search
Every day, Primer ingests and analyzes a feed from LexisNexis of nearly 1 million native or translated English-language documents from roughly 50,000 publications around the world, as well as select native language sources from Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, French, Malay, and Indonesian that are translated into English.
At ingestion, Primer runs every document through proprietary algorithms to summarize its contents, extract entities (people, locations, quotes, organizations, etc), and calculate relationships with previously discovered entities and events, building out a massive knowledge base. When a user conducts a search, the system surfaces the precomputed entities, events, and relationships from the up-to-5,000 documents most relevant to your keywords within the prescribed date range.
To create a new Boolean query on our database of historical news documents, navigate to the News Search Tab, and select your preferred source language from the right side of the search bar:
Boolean Search Basics
Enter the desired keywords (Primer will take care of root variants) into the search field of the search bar. Primer will suggest entities (people, locations, and organizations) corresponding to the keywords and offer the option to affirmatively select and search on the entity (including common variants), rather than the keyword, with clear gains in precision (e.g., search for Turkey the country, not also turkey the bird; Apple the company, not also the fruit; Walt Disney the person, not also the company). When selected, by click or keyboard navigation, entities appear highlighted in the search bar.
Please Note: For an individual or organization to appear in the drop-down menu, Primer needs to identify at least 1,000 mentions of the entity and any alias(es) across documents in our data set.
Choosing Ford the company, not Doug Ford, the politician.
Connect the keywords/entities by boolean operators, if necessary. Primer will default to requiring that all provided keywords/entities appear in the results. For information on how to use boolean operators to expand or constrain searches, visit the help article here.
Use the drop-down window to the right of the search field to choose from among pre-set rolling date ranges or enter custom dates.
Custom date queries will always display the results from the dates selected when the query was first run and are not available on the landing page.
Rolling queries will automatically update with the most recent information whenever viewed by the user. For example, a rolling query with a date range of ‘Last 7 days’ will always show an analysis of documents from the most recent seven days whenever accessed, no matter when it was first run. Report snapshots of rolling queries can be viewed on the landing page.
If desired, use the drop-down window to the right of the date picker to select from among several pre-set source lists, a previously created source list, or select sources by location. Click here to learn how to create a source list.
If desired, use the drop down window to the right of the source picker to select from among several Event Types -- machine learning models designed to highlight news on a particular topic. Note that certain corporate risk event types (e.g., ‘Mergers and Acquisitions’) apply only to the 700+ major organizations that are currently tracked and searchable. Click here to learn more about Event Types. Reach out if you are interested in adding others as we build out this list!
Finally, hit enter or click the magnifying glass icon on the right of the search bar to be taken to the query results.
Altering a Query from within the Results
When exploring the full results of a specific query, the search bar displaying the parameters for that query will continue to display at the top of each page. Simply edit those parameters to run a new query and immediately explore the new results (the old query will still be accessible via the workspace).
Search on the Title of Articles
To return results that only include keywords present in the title of articles (vs. present anywhere in the body or title of the articles for a standard search) begin a query with: title: , and continue crafting the search from there:
Please note that entities presented in the drop-down menu cannot be used to create a title search:
Search on Publications From Specific Geographic Regions
To search on sources from a specific geographic location, select "sources by location" under the main sources drop-down. Then select one, or many continents or countries from which to search from:
Search on Exact Matches
To search on the "exact match" of a term or terms (and not the root variants), put the exact term you would like to query in quotation marks. Querying "citi" will return all exact matches of "citi", and will not include "cities" or "city" or any other variant.
Using Polygon/Custom Region Search
Use Polygon search to create custom geographic search areas. With Polygon search, all countries, states/regions, provinces and cities with a population greater than 5,000 people that are mentioned within the custom region created will be included in your query. Points of Interest (ex: Empire State Building) are also included.
Follow the steps below to get started!
1. On the search bar, select the "Show Custom Regions" icon:
2. Select the 'Polygon Tool' at the upper left corner of the map search screen:
3. Next, using the 'Polygon Tool' (the square icon in the top left corner) draw the area for your query by clicking on points surrounding the search location. To begin creating a polygon, click on the map where you would like the polygon to begin. Once you have successfully enclosed your area of interest, double-click on your final point. You can also drag your completed polygon or create multiple polygons for each search.
4. With your 'Custom Region' defined, you can now narrow the results of your search to the intended area. Type in the subject of your choice and click on 'search' to put Primer to work!
Query Sharing
You can share a query by directly populating it into a colleague's account in two ways. From any page within Analyze, select the "Share Query" button:
Or you can share a query from the My Searches section of the News Search tab via the share icon on the right hand side of a query:
Then, enter the email of the user you'd like to share the query with. You can also select "Share with all users in your organization." This will automatically populate the query into the account(s) of the user(s) selected.
Once a query is shared, it will be populated directly into the My Searches section of the shared user(s).
Please note: If you are sharing a query built on a Primer Curated Source List or one created with select sources by location, the shared query will transfer over with those sources contained as part of the search. If you are sharing a query that is built on a custom source list you've created, that query will be shared with "all sources" selected instead of the custom source list.
Accessing Previous Queries
To access the results of a previously-run analysis, a user can select the relevant query from the list appearing on the My Searches section of the News Search Page. Favorited queries can also be accessed via the landing page. For more information on query management, please click here.