DA Search query help

DEVONagent Tips
1

I am trying to set up a DA search set that I will use to keep up on a particular industry (news, articles, etc.). I am looking for some help in how to structure the two part query.

I need the query to definitely contain sites relating to public-private partnerships. Unfortunately, these go by a number of different names. So, the first portion of the query looks like:

(“public?private partnership*” OR PPP OR P3)

The second half of the query looks for specific asset classes that are being executed through public-private partnerships. It looks like this:

(education OR housing OR port OR road)

Together the completed query looks like:

(“public?private partnership*” OR PPP OR P3) AND (education OR housing OR port OR road)

I would think this would be correct. However, some of the results returned only have “housing” in them with no mention of PPP, P3, etc. Where am I screwing this up? Also, is there a way to structure this so that web sites that only mention P3’s (items in the first set of parenthesis) and not any of the terms in the second set of parenthesis would be returned? Presumably, these would be articles discussing the P3 industry in general and not P3’s related to a specific asset class.

Thanks in advance,
Brad

2

Depending on the settings (see “Settings” tab of search window or “Advanced” tab of search sets), DEVONagent might match additional metadata (e.g. title, URL, keywords etc.). Or do you use a secondary query too?

In case that the second parenthesis is optional, you could replace the AND operator with the OPT operator:

(“public?private partnership*” OR PPP OR P3) OPT (education OR housing OR port OR road)

3

I do have it searching keywords, metadata etc., so maybe that’s where the results are coming from. Good thought!

Genius, pure genius. That works perfectly.

Thanks again!

Brad