To bake the best cherry pie you need the best cherries – but how do you identify them? Two obvious solutions: Ask your grocer or ask Google. Of course, ask Google and you get – literally – three million results.
But what if you could combine the grocer’s knowledge and experience with the best information on the internet?
Search filtration, curation and analysis does just that – whether you’re looking for information about fruit or seeking actionable intelligence for your business.
Creative Commons – Matt McGee
Ask Google about “Global Finance Trends,” for example, and you get three million results. That’s right – 3,000,000. The information you seek is in there somewhere. But where?
Search engines’ algorithms – their “secret sauce” that the rest of us can only guess at – analyse and rank results based on complex calculations related to relevancy, popularity and even your geographic location in order to return the most pertinent information. At least, that’s the theory. The reality is the 3,000,000 results.
How can you be sure that the first link, or even the second or 10th, is the cherry on the cake you need?
At the moment, the success of your search is now fully on your shoulders. You must wade through the list of results, filter for the most relevant – and hope you find the information you want. The clock ticks and your work piles up as you scroll through outdated information and repeated stories, while stumbling across irrelevant articles – and suffering the spreading plague of dreaded “fake news” that has managed to elude the search engine’s filter and ranking algorithms.
Can you afford to waste your time?
Why human filters matters
With data being generated at lightning speed across every sector and industry in today’s digital landscape, the need for precise filtration and analysis has never been greater. Efficient search algorithms are a significant foundation, but they must underlie human knowledge and experience – the skilled cherry-picker.
Because technology alone doesn’t solve the problem, we created VitalBriefing, our global network of professional journalists and editors working directly with clients to review and evaluate all digitally-available news and research materials served up by search engines and databases to produce actionable, easy-to-digest, business intelligence on their schedule and to their specifications.
The human layer makes the difference: Our staff know what matters to our clients, reviewing, summarising and fact-checking the information to ensure the veracity of the business intelligence we provide.
We believe the best value is delivered by merging the best technology and journalistic skills. While search-only and artificial intelligence-based solutions get results, they often lack relevance, and leave users wondering if something is missing, either from the overall coverage or within the news itself.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make your own use of search more efficient and useful. In upcoming posts, I will peel back the technology to discuss how our search capabilities work on external sources to pull in the information relevant to your business. I will also address how analysing internal data enables us to refine results and understand the value of news to clients.
In short, I’ll share our “secret sauce” so that you can be more efficient in your work.
