Welcome to the New Way to Search, AlphaSense X

Never has there been so much pressure to find critical insights and leverage them to inform business or investment decisions. Whether you are focused on companies or themes, the need to discover insights quickly is paramount.

This challenge continues to increase as more and more data is published daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly across disparate sources, making it more difficult to comb through the information. This also creates an issue of confidence – how can you be sure you went through every relevant source and aren’t missing any critical pieces of information?

To address these challenges and empower our users’ search capabilities, AlphaSense will be making a series of upgrades to our platform, called AlphaSense X. These enhancements will leverage AI as a proactive force within the platform, discovering critical insights faster accessible than ever before.

We released the first AlphaSense X upgrade earlier in Q1 with Company Topics, which provides a visual breakdown of the topics a company is discussing. You don’t need to search to know what’s impacting their business. 

Now, we are introducing a new search experience. 

We launched this new experience as a Beta feature in Q4 2020, and we are ready to release it to the public after collecting and incorporating hundreds of user feedback notes.

The New AlphaSense Search Experience

To arrive at this new search experience, the AlphaSense team took a step back and thought about the purpose of a search platform and settled on two key themes: 1) time; and 2) results.

Saving Users Search Time

With search time in their crosshairs, the team analyzed over 3.5 million examples of user search flows, looking for parts of the search process that could be eliminated, reduced, or refined to save time. With the team’s analysis and user feedback, we identified two main areas for improvement:

1. Content shortcuts: We observed that specific content sources were utilized in greater volume than others, depending on the search type. As a result, the new search experience includes ever-present content shortcuts designed to reduce the number of clicks a given search takes.
2. Document previews: Users often clicked through several documents in the search results to identify the best fit for what they were looking for. As a result, we now provide document previews so users can quickly determine if a document serves their needs without clicking through.

Leveraging AI to improve navigation

The team analyzed over 8 million read events that followed successful searches, looking for patterns between search parameters and documents read. 

They found some key trends and, with plenty of user feedback, have introduced two key upgrades to the AlphaSense platform:

1. AI suggested content filters: Our AI technology now takes the search parameters users entered and offers additional content filters to help narrow down searches for better, more specific results. This means different suggestions will be shown based on what the user is trying to find.
2. Automatic result sorting: Results are now sorted based on the user’s search parameters to make sure sorting is optimized for the best results and that users are exposed to the most relevant documents.

Using AlphaSense for an optimal search experience

How can you use the new search? We’ve identified several use cases where this new search will enhance the user experience:

• • Suppose you are new to AlphaSense OR are researching a company or theme for the first time. Having our AI technology make content suggestions will help you quickly understand how to best narrow your search and complete the task of finding the ideal document and critical insights more accessible and faster.
  • Suppose you are in exploratory mode OR researching a new topic around a company or theme. In this scenario, two of these new features will serve you best. First, our AI technology will make content suggestions based on your exact keywords, helping you uncover additional, relevant content types for your search so that you can find new insights and ideas. 

• Suppose you are searching for a more obscure company or topic. With the company proximity filter, you can expand your search to ‘All Mentions.’ When searching a company and keywords, AlphaSense will return all primary documents containing your keyword and any record that includes your keyword in proximity to a mention of your company, ensuring that you don’t miss any key insights.

• If you have internal docs automatically syncing, take notes, annotate, and bookmark. AlphaSense is only as powerful as the content available to search within. The quick content filter for ‘Integrations/Notes’ allows instant filtering to these sources only for users who have integrated and synced internal docs and notes stored in the system. And you can use the My Content filter to quickly filter to ‘only mine,’ which are all integrations, letters, annotated or bookmarked documents that match your search criteria.

We’re excited to see how you can make the most of this new search experience. If you’d like to know more about AlphaSense X, check out our AlphaSenseX webinar here. If you’ve never used AlphaSense before, we’d like to invite you to a free trial so that you can experience our robust search platform for yourself. Sign up for your practice here.