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| STEP 1 - INTRODUCTION |
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This guide will get you acquainted with our search facility (Business Insights Search) and enable you to find the information you want, quickly and easily. With the tips in this guide you can increase the accuracy of your searches to give you more complete, and relevant results.
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| STEP 2 - HOW THE SEARCH ENGINE WORKS |
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Once you have entered your search term (a word or a phrase) in the search box hit 'go'. Business Insights Search then looks through every single publication in our portfolio and returns a set of results it calculates to be most relevant.
From the search results you can view a short description of any of the publications simply by clicking on the title. You will also have the option to download/view supporting material including a table of contents.
Often the search will return more than one page of results. In these cases if you are unable to find what you want on the first page then simply click on '2', '3' '4', '5' directly above the search results to view the next selection of results.
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| STEP 3 - REFINING YOUR SEARCH |
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Occasionally you will find that the results are too broad. There are various ways you can refine your search to retrieve more targeted results.
Enclose your search term in quotation marks
Say for example you wanted to find out information on the UK water industry. If you type in UK water, Business Insights Search will look for publications which contain all instances of the word UK OR Water, where as if you search for "UK Water" (enclosed in quotation marks) instead, it looks specifically for instances of these words together.
This technique should always be used, whenever searching for a specific subject or phrase which contains more than one word.
Be Specific
Be careful when a word has multiple meanings. Think of the word "investment" as an example. Entering just the word "investment" as a term, Business Insights Search has to determine whether you're looking for information about financial investment, investment in people, or even investment in an idea. Consequently the results are likely to be too general to be of use. Instead construct a phrase which targets the specific area you are interested in e.g. 'investment thresholds', 'investment funds' 'online investment' etc. to focus upon a specific topic.
Products and Services
If you are require information about a particular product, brand, service or company you can enter this straight into the search box to immediately pull up a list of reports with information pertaining to your search.
The key is to understand the information needed or type of results you require and modify your search accordingly.
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| STEP 4 - OTHER CONSIDERATIONS |
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Check Your Spelling
Nearly correct doesn't = correct. Business Insights Search only tries to match your search term to the words and phrases in its index. It does not try to match variations on words. I.e. it does not proximity search.
Some words may be spelt in American English in some reports, or traditional English in others depending on Author and/or Coverage.
'Stop Words'
Stop words are words too common to generate meaningful results. Example of stop words are 'the', 'at', 'go' etc. Stop words should only be used as part of a phrase in quotation marks (see previous section) when looking for a specific sentence, phrase or report title.
Search Parameters
- Business Insights results are weighted towards newer publications.
- The Business Insights search supports a limited range of BOOLEAN operators (OR, AND and NOT)
- The search engine is not case sensitive.
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| STEP 5 - UNDERSTANDING YOUR RESULTS |
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Occasionally the search engine will return results that do not immediately seem as though they could be relevant to your search. For example if you were to search on "Thames Water" (a major UK utility company) you would see the following results:
- Contact Centres: Strategies for success
- Preparing for Competition in the UK Water Industry
- Strategies for Utilities in the European Telecommunications Market
- Liberalisation in European Energy
- Strategic Guide to Global Power Companies
Whilst 'Preparing for Competition in the UK Water Industry' and 'Liberalisation in European Energy' would appear to be relevant, the other 4 titles are perhaps more tenuous. By explaining why they are pulled into the search results you should get a better understanding of how Business Insights Search operates.
Strategic Guide to Global Power Companies
Thames water has close affiliations with Electricidade de Portugal, RWE Energie two major global power companies.
Strategies for Utilities in the European Telecommunications Market
Examines how Utility companies such as Thames Water are utilizing telecom technologies to improve their information infrastructure, and how utility companies are incorporating Telecoms into their service portfolio to clients.
Contact Centres: Strategies for success
This contains an in-depth case study on how Thames Water developed their call centre into a multi-channel contact centre to improve their Customer Relationship Management strategy.
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| STEP 6 - OTHER WAYS TO SEARCH THE SITE: SEARCHING BY SUB-SECTOR |
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All Business Insights publications are now listed by sub-sector/interest. You can access these listings by visiting the relevant industry homepage and clicking the ‘product listing’ link
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| STEP 7 - FEEDBACK |
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| We welcome any constructive comments regarding how useful you have found both our search engine results and this help guide. We are continually looking to improve our site's functionality and the information you provide will enable us to refine and develop our service to you. Just click here. Alternatively you can click here for help on other website-related topics, or here to return to your search results. |
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