Factiva tracks the characters and companies that matter.

Byline: Kim Thomas

Factiva tracks the characters and companies that matter

We're all used to the Google model of search -- easy to use, but often too unfocused to be useful. Type "Bill Gates" (remembering the inverted commas) into the Google search box, and you'll get nearly 25 million results.

Google is fine in its way, but most of us will sometimes require a tool that pinpoints the information we're looking for more precisely. One such tool is Factiva.com, a news and business information service that was launched in 2001 as a replacement for Dow Jones Interactive and Reuters Business Briefing. It has now grown to provide full-text access to more than 10,000 sources.

Given the range of services it offers, Factiva.com is relatively easy to use. The login process is straightforward, and takes you to a search screen. The other three features offered by Factiva.com -- Track, News Pages and Companies/ Markets -- are available from tabs at the top of the screen, but the service defaults to Search. (You can also access the Beta version of the Factiva Search 2.0 service.)

The Free Text search box allows you to get searching straight away, even if you are not familiar with the various options. To carry out a simple full-text search of all Factiva.com's sources, just enter a word or phrase into the box. The date field defaults to the last three months, but you can choose different date ranges, such as the last day or the last week, or specify your own. It's fast. Type in the words "Bill Gates" and use the date setting of the last three months, and Factiva.com instantly comes up with 4,692 results. It displays 20 results per page, each result showing the headline, publication name, date and first two lines of the text.

You can refine the search by using a variety of operators, such as "and", "or" and "atleast". So type in "atleast3 Bill Gates," and the results narrow to the 210 articles that mention the name "Bill Gates" three or more times. The w/ operator allows you to specify that you want articles where the word appears near another word. So "Blair w/3 Gates" finds articles where the word Blair is found within three words of Gates -- 17 altogether.