Searching in Seamless Horizons is easy! When you land on the application after signing in the single search bar is the first thing you see. You can simply type in a search term and hit enter to get started on a very basic level. If you simply type one word, this will search for any matches of that word against all of the text data in the database, whether that is from a CSV file, HTML scrape, or extracted from a PDF file.
It is however very important to keep in mind that Seamless Horizons does not function like a typical Google search. When you search more than one term in Seamless Horizons you are searching for the existence of any of those terms across any of the data in the system.
So for example if I search Patrick, I get results for any file that has the word Patrick. If I search Patrick Baine, I get results for any file that has either Patrick OR Baine in the text. If I want to search for the name Patrick Baine as a full term, I need to use quotation marks to link those values together and search for that exact phrase.
This added complexity can be a powerful tool if harnessed correctly, but it can also lead to some confusion in understanding why you received the results that you are seeing in the search page. We highly encourage users to read through the Advanced Search Guide to understand how to use the query builder and search operators to more effectively discover results in the data within Seamless Horizons.
When you enter a query and hit the search button, you will land on the results page. The results page lets you view your results, filter down the results to specific data/file types, data sets, languages, regions, or countries. From here you can click into and preview the individual files or entries, download them to your local environment, or navigate to the data dictionary to understand the source of the information.
Walkthrough/Demo
Walkthrough/Demo
1. From the landing page of the application, enter your search term into the search bar in the middle of the page. For the purpose of this demo I will be looking for results which contain the word Patrick.
2. If you'd like to filter down to only search through specific datasets you can click the Filter Datasets button on the right side. This will display a list of data available for you, from here you can search through the data and check the boxes for the datasets that you want.
3. Once you are done entering in a search term and applying the proper filters, either hit enter or click the search icon on the right side of the search bar.
4. It might take some time to generate results dependant on how broad your search query is. I can see 293,284 total results with Patrick in them! That is way too much for an analyst to sift through manually.
5. On the left side of the results page you can see the number of results based on the file/data type. If I only want CSV results I can click the box next to CSV to apply the filter automatically. The page will refresh with new results based on your filter.
6. Similarly, below is a list of results for each dataset. If I only want to see results from the Belgium Corporate Registry I click the box and it will automatically filter the results.
7. To undo the filters from the search page, click the x icon on the red tab showing how many filters have been applied.
8. To view individual data points, click on the icon or the name of the entity/dataset to bring up a preview viewer.
9. From here you can preview a file (for raw data) or view information about an entity and its intervals (for modeled data).
10. To download the file or data click the download icon to the right of the result.
11. To view the data dictionary entry for the dataset, click the knowledge wiki icon to the right of the result.
