Search Syntax - Talkwalker Alerts

Keyword Search

Search for simple brands, products, keywords…

Boolean Operators

AND combines two keywords:
BMW AND bike will find all entries which mention the keyword “BMW” and the keyword “bike”.

AND NOT excludes a word of an entry:
BMW AND NOT bike will find all entries with the keyword “BMW”, but only if the notion “bike” is not contained in the same article.

“-” operator: excluding keywords

Similar to the “NOT” operator, the minus operator can be used to exclude keywords out of your results e.g.:
chocolate -swiss
BMW -site:”mysite.com” excludes the results from your own webpage or any other webpage

OR means that at least one of the terms that are linked by an OR have to be mentioned in the same article:
BMW OR bike will find all entries that include either the keyword “BMW” or the keyword “bike”.

Search for exact Character Strings

Quotes “ ” are used to find an exact character string:
“BMW series” will find all entries that contain the exact character string “BMW series”. In contrast, the search query BMW AND series does not respect the order.

Site-specific searches

Luxembourg site:”http://www.wort.lu” websites should be specified with quotation marks
BlackBerry site:”www.cnet.com” site:”bild.de” shows the results found on both websites

Combinations

Brackets ( ) are used to group several keywords in a way that operators can be applied on multiple terms within the brackets (distributive law):
BMW AND (motorcycle OR car) is a short form for (BMW AND motorcycle) OR (BMW AND car).

Wildcard Search

The wildcard operator * is a character that stands for 0 or any possible number of characters:
Luxemb* will find all entries including keywords like “Luxembourg”, “Luxemburg”, “Luxemburgish”, etc. Wildcards are only accepted at the end of a keyword.

Wildcard Search – One Character

The question mark ? has a similar function as the wildcard operator, but only replaces exactly one character:
It is useful in consideration of British and American English, e.g.: reali?ation finds realisation but also realization.

Proximity Search

The tilde symbol ~ analyses the surroundings of a character string which is enclosed in quotes (consisting of at least two words):
“obama merkel“~5 finds every entry, containing the keywords obama and merkel within an interval of maximum of 5 jumps, for example “A statement released from the White House said Obama , Monti and Merkel agreed on certain steps“ .

You cannot combine the tilde with the wildcard operator.

Raw Data Inquiry

A simple + in front of a keyword samples an exact character string including special characters, it considers lower and upper cases and punctuation. It also works with brackets and tilde:
+“l’oréal" or +“d&g".
++”eBay” in addition also respects the case of the letters and hence excludes the results “ebay” and “Ebay”…

Title Search

Adding title: searches within the title of an article:
title:BMW will find all results which contain the keyword BMW within the title.
title:”obama merkel”~5 matches with: “Obama Seeking Ally Finds Merkel a Tough Sell”.

Content Search

Adding content: searches within the article:
content:BMW will find all results mentioning BMW within the main text of the article.

Source Country Restriction

Adding sourcecountry: searches for the country of origin of the sources:
sourcecountry:de filters all articles from German sources and that were published in Germany.

Article Country Restriction

Adding articlecountry: searches for country detection within the article.
articlecountry:de filters all articles that contain the term Germany.

“Query: Too Many Terms”

When using complicated boolean expressions please be aware that they are limited to 10 clauses! This means that you can only use 9 Boolean operators (like: AND, OR, site…) in your queries. Thank you for your understanding.