If you follow an industry for content or PR work, you need relevant reporting that helps you understand what your market is discussing. The News Index covers news, blogs and podcasts from more than four million feeds, and holds roughly two million documents in any thirty days. When you are following a market and not only your own name, how you search matters more than what you type.
Keywords find your name. Meaning finds your market.
Your brand name is exact, so a keyword match is the right tool for it.
Your market is not exact. Writers use their own words. An article about the problem you solve may never name your category once. A piece about the regulation that governs your industry may name the regulation and never the industry.
A meaning search compares your description against stored documents by position, not by matching words, so a relevant article comes back even when it shares none of your terms. Those tend to be the best things you find, because they are about the problem and not about the product category.
Writing a query that finds them
Describe the situation the way somebody writing about it would describe it.
Weak: hospitality workforce management. That is an internal label, and it finds articles written by people who use internal labels.
Better: restaurants struggling to fill shifts at short notice and what it does to service quality. That describes what such an article actually contains.
Longer and more specific works better here. Keyword search teaches you the opposite habit, so this takes some unlearning.
The coverage window
The index keeps two monthly tables, so it reaches this month and last month. It tells you what is being published now. It is not an archive.
For a market you follow week to week that window is usually fine, because coverage from two years ago rarely changes this quarter's plan. When something does matter, save it while it is still in range.
Reading a result set
A meaning search reads a set of candidates and returns a grouped shortlist, so two things are true of every result you see.
It is a shortlist. Nothing was found does not mean nothing exists.
And narrowing the query changes which candidates get read in the first place. A more specific search is a different search, not a filtered version of the broad one. When something you expected is missing, describe it another way before deciding it is not there.
Turning the reading into work
Market research produces reading, and reading on its own produces nothing. Take three notes as you go.
Which publications keep coming up. One that covers your subject repeatedly is a placement prospect, and the time to introduce yourself is before you want something. Check whether it takes contributions while you are on the site.
Which questions keep coming up. An article describing a problem your buyers have, written by someone with no stake in your product, tells you what your market is thinking about. Write from that.
Who gets quoted. Journalists go back to the same experts. Whether you are one of them has a yes or no answer.
Keeping it to twenty minutes
Market research expands to fill the time you give it. Give it twenty minutes and a decision at the end.
Each week, run two or three standing queries describing the problems you solve. Scan for publications and questions, add what is useful to the relevant list, and read in full only what will change something.
Once a month, look at what recurred. The repeated subjects are where your market's attention is. The repeated publications are where your placement effort belongs.
What this is not
No social platforms and no review sites, so it is not social listening. No collection of the web sees everything, so a result set is never the complete record of what was written. And nothing arrives on its own unless you have also set up monitoring for a term. This is research you go and do.
During your market review, open the relevant coverage and note its source and date. Use it to inform the next research question or content assignment.
See the News Index, searching coverage by meaning, or turning coverage into content ideas.