Use Combined Searches to organize your monitoring

Learn the details of Explore's Combined Search feature allowing you to quickly combine your existing saved searches into a new search

Whitney W. avatar
Written by Whitney W.
Updated over a week ago

Welcome to your go-to-guide on Combined Searches!

This feature within Explore has been designed to help you quickly form complex searches across multiple topics and themes to ensure easy collaboration with your team members and consistency across your keywords and measurements.

Combined Searches allows you to quickly combine your existing saved searches, filter sets, and custom categories into a new search.


How to create a combined search

  1. Select Explore from the left-hand side navigation bar

  2. Select 'create' within the Combined Search tile

  3. Select Add Search within the first ‘All of these’ search box

  4. From the list of your saved search folders, tick the Searches you’d like to combine

Combined search uses the three criteria boxes of Keyword Search to bring together the existing folders with either AND, OR or NOT boolean. If you'd like to learn more about Keyword Search or think your new search may need to use Boolean for more extensive search criteria, check out our Learn Simple & Boolean Search article here.

5. Select Update Results for the content and graphs to populate

Now that you're reviewing your results, you can share and manage the content using the tick box to select the relevant articles and choosing one of the following quick tools:

  • Sentiment Override - You can update the automated sentiment applied to multiple articles at once.

  • Share - Allows you to share this article via email to another email address.

  • Tag - Tags can be used as archive folders to group all types of documents and can then be used for dashboard reporting, distributing newsletters and share content to your website newsfeed.

  • Export Content - You'll shortly be emailed an Excel spreadsheet of the coverage that has been selected. To learn more about this export option, please review this article here.

  • Hide - Removes the article selected from your results across the whole platform. Please see a screen tour of how this works within the platform via this link.

  • Open Menu (which will allow you to Post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Translate)

  • Translate

If you’d like to save your results as a new search folder:

  1. Click Save in the top left-hand corner

  2. Enter a Name for the search folder and select your Search Type of News search, Social search or Broadcast search.

  3. Click Ok to finish your set up

Once saved, it will appear within the list of your saved searches.


Using filter sets and custom categories

When building and/or editing a Combined search in addition to selecting from Saved Searches you have the option to select from Filter Sets, as well as saved Custom Categories. They can be used in all three boolean boxes.

When utilizing Filter Sets and Custom Categories inputs for Combined searches you can expand on the value of Combined searches. Combining filter sets and custom categories decreases the number of saved searches you may need to find relevant results.

In Combined search, when selecting inputs, you will see the option to select saved Filter Sets and Custom Categories.

When selected, filter sets will display a filter icon before the name, while custom categories will display shapes.

Filter sets and custom categories are applied following the same logic as saved searches, via each of the three boxes (All, at least one, None).


Edit or Duplicate a Search

Quickly and efficiently make edits to your search keywords or filters directly from Combined search without having to exit the environment to make edits to the original search.

To Edit:

  1. Select the dropdown arrow on your selected searches

  2. Select Edit

  3. A new window will load displaying the current search set up, make the desired edits to the keywords or filters

  4. Select Save in the bottom right hand corner

To Duplicate

  1. Select the dropdown arrow on your selected searches

  2. Select Duplicate

  3. Within the popup, give your duplicated search a new name

  4. Select Save


Important feature notes

  1. Existing searches can only be combined using the three-box criteria which uses the boolean operators OR, AND and NOT.

  2. When combining searches using the AND box, please note that the existing saved searches must not have conflicting filters applied. This is because the results return documents that match all saved searches used in the AND box. For example, if you combined one saved search that's monitoring across 'Twitter' and another saved search that's monitoring across 'Forums’' in the AND box, you would return 0 results. This is because a document cannot be both from Forums and Twitter.

  3. Ensure any desired Search Filters, such as source-type, are adjusted within the existing saved search before being combined as these can only be adjusted within the original saved search folder.

  4. Analytics and Widgets aren't currently clickable

  5. Analytics/widgets will not be clickable, with the exception of the latest activity graph, because filters are unavailable. Clicking the latest activity graph will only refresh the date, it will not filter by the source-type.

  6. If you delete a saved search that was used in a saved Combined Search, the saved search will be removed from the saved Combined Search


Suggested Articles

Want to learn more about the features within Explore designed to help you organize and analyze your search results, check out one of the following articles:


💡 Tip

Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.

Find answers and get help from Meltwater Support and Community Experts.


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