8 tips for building effective queries and sourcing on your intelligence platform

To set up an ideal watch, you need the right methodologies and the right reflexes. The ideal configuration should enable you to detect all the important information on your monitoring theme, identify weak signals and keep the time needed to consult the resulting feeds to a minimum. You can use the time you save to analyze, enrich and disseminate your information. That's why in this article we're sharing eight tips for building relevant queries and achieving high-performance sourcing!

1. Test your queries and sources

To achieve the ideal monitoring setup, we recommend an iterative approach. Start testing your queries, even if they're modest and broad, on the web, on Google and Bing for example. This Test & Learn approach will help you identify the latest news and trends in your field, so you'll have a better idea of which areas to monitor. This first step will help you list more precise keywords and referent sources (sector sources, official sources, players, etc.), to find relevant information on your topic.

With this initial search, you can test filters and sources to evaluate your information flow. On Curebot, you can test your first ideas by editing a simple query, and then more advanced queries in just a few clicks.

The aim is to approach ideal filtering, by finding the right balance between sources and keywords.

This exploratory process enables you to refine your filtering by eliminating noise-generating sources, and to identify keywords responsible for unwanted information feedback. Nevertheless, if your query doesn't satisfy you, if it makes too much noise or doesn't bring up enough relevant information, don't panic! You can purge the bots and start afresh by testing a new query. On Curebot, you can "purge" the bots: this will cause information identified as irrelevant to be overwritten, via your filter, so you can start afresh by testing new keywords.

2. Develop your digital skills to enhance your information competencies

Faced with the digitalization of our professional and personal lives, infobesity and fake news, the ongoing development of information skills is a major challenge, for information professionals and for all corporate employees. According to the American Library Association[1]information literacy means being "able to recognize when an information need arises, and being able to find, evaluate and use appropriate information". The repository of informational skills published in 2012, meanwhile, distinguishes 4 major families of informational skills:

Identify an information need and define its nature and scope
Efficiently access the information you need
Produce and communicate results
Critically assess the information obtained

So, to access the information you need efficiently, and to obtain the ideal settings, it's essential to identify the various departments and platforms, both internal and external to the company, which host the data and resources of interest, and to know how to use them effectively.

If most of us are familiar with a few specific commands for optimizing search results on Google (filetype, inurl. etc.), we invite you to discover this page: start.mewhich provides a wide range of digital platform exploration tools, order lists and databases to help you make the most of the wealth of information freely available on the web.

[1 ] Translation by P. Bernhard. Final Report of the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy(https://bbf.enssib.fr/consulter/bbf-2005-02-0042-007#note-2)

https://start.me/p/rx6Qj8/nixintel-s-osint-resource-list

3. Make the most of your human network

We recommend that you don't ignore the expertise of your professional and personal networks! To understand the issues, identify the best sources, the relevant keywords, and find the information you need, cross-fertilize everyone's ideas and knowledge. That's the power of collective intelligence!

The best way to create an ideal setup and optimize monitoring and analysis time is to build a collaborative monitoring system. Curebot has been designed to enable you to create a team-based monitoring environment. You can create a group and pool your sourcing efforts within a catalog of sources, optimize the drafting of your queries together, and manage the qualification, analysis and distribution of resources as a team.

Thanks to Curebot's cross-search function, you can find alerts, bots, smartfolders, newsletters and even groups that include your term. A great way to find out who's already working on the topic you're interested in. You can subscribe, or even contact them directly. They can be a great help if you need specific information on the subject, or if you want to build a watch close to their area of expertise.

In your company, identify the communities and groups that exist internally on specific themes. If you have a corporate social network, these communities may exist, so you can identify your colleagues to contact.

4. Optimize your query with Boolean operators

Boolean operators allow you to reduce, extend or refine the results of your query. Combined with keywords, the use of these operators not only saves time, but also simplifies the user's work.

There are various types of operators that can be used on monitoring platforms such as Curebot:

Simple operators

AND	Must combine keywords	AND GAFAM regulation
OR	Search for one keyword or another, or both	OR regulation
NOT	Excludes a keyword from the search. Priority status	GAFAM NOT IBM
(...)	Combines several operators	((regulation AND GAFAM) AND ("personal data" OR cloud)) NOT IBM
"..."	To search for an exact expression. All criteria between quotation marks will be considered mandatory to match the query.	"Personal data
?	Mandatory replacement of a single character	Data
*	Optionally replaces a sequence of characters	Rule

Advanced operators

"word1 word2"~n	Defines a maximum distance separating linked words between quotation marks. Order doesn't matter.	"word1 word2"~3
"word1 word2 word3"~n	The proximity operator also works with several terms: "mot1 mot2 mot3"~n. Defines a maximum distance separating linked words between quotation marks. Order doesn't matter.	"word1 word2 word3"~n
Example~n	Introduces a tolerance for a given number of errors anywhere in the word. A fault is defined as the insertion, deletion or substitution of a character, or the inversion of two neighboring characters.	Scooter~2
title:	Searches for a keyword in the resource title. Respect the lower case of title.	title:("en marche" AND ?lection AND (Macron OR Castex))
body:	Searches for a keyword in the body of the resource. Body is written in lower case.	body:cloud
word {n}	Defines a number of words present a minimum of n times in the resource	Sobriety {2}

Whenever possible, we recommend you test your query in your search engine, to check that the information that comes up matches your search.

We advise you to adopt a test & learn approach. Test simple queries at first, and make them more complex as you go along. A classic mistake is to build a query that is too complex and then lose the ability to understand why the resulting feed doesn't match the resources you want to find.

5. Segment your sources and watches

Build your watch by segmenting it by source typology (types of press, languages, regions, players, etc.) to easily identify the nature of the information gathered and better order the flow of resources. This organization allows you to build customized queries for each type of sourcing. It's better to monitor 20 good sources, rather than 100 more or less relevant ones.

In addition to using the source collections maintained by the Curebot teams and adding a single source of interest to your bots, we encourage you to build up your own source catalogs, and segment them according to your needs. They will enable you to re-exploit your sources in all the monitoring you build. As soon as you add or correct a source in these catalogs, all the bots and watches that exploit them will benefit from your updates.

6. Keep your sourcing healthy

An RSS feed can evolve like any other website: it can be deleted, or the feed link can change. Maintaining sourcing is an essential part of effective intelligence. Otherwise, the feed will no longer be taken into account and will no longer provide any information.

Plan a time every month to maintain and update your sources. Curebot makes it easy for you, showing you all inactive RSS feeds and their dates directly via the interface.

To update these inactive RSS feeds, don't panic: restart the RSS feed search via Curebot and retrieve the new link, or the Twitter account associated with the source if it has one.

If the source you want to monitor doesn't have an RSS feed, thanks to its RSS feed creation module, Curebot is able to track the various categories of a website (articles, press releases, etc.) by creating a new feed.

7. Think beyond RSS feeds

In addition to the RSS feeds you want to monitor, other sources can provide information of interest to your topic. Twitter is a great tool for identifying and following the experts who communicate on your topics of interest. Associate and/or partner Twitter accounts, as well as the accounts of managers and even employee representatives, can be good sources of information to complement the company's "traditional" sources (website, blogs, etc.).

In addition to RSS feeds and social networks, in some cases it's useful to monitor the evolution of web pages. Monitoring web sites and being alerted when changes (management list, products, different content, etc.) occur is a non-negligible added value for staying on top of your environment.

8. Keep a watch on the watch

Beyond the smile that this phrase may provoke, it's worth looking at the evolution of its practices and tools. In fact, information sources are changing, the digital platforms you use are evolving, and monitoring actions and needs are transforming: to ensure you optimize your practices, keep abreast of these evolutions, new practices, and new tools for monitoring, detecting and analyzing information. Keeping up to date with related news and tips is important to ensure that you don't miss out on any novelty or advice that could inevitably add value to your watch.

To stay informed and make sure you don't miss out on any news in the field of monitoring, we recommend you keep an eye on these sources:

outilsfroids.net by Christophe Deschamps, consultant and trainer, knowledge management and business intelligence.
rsscircus initiated by Serge Courrier, independent consultant and trainer in intelligence, OSINT and digital strategies.
outilsveille.com on new monitoring and community management tools, by Fidel Navamuel in his capacity as journalist and editor-in-chief.
bases-netsources.fr/advice-monitoring by FLA Consultants, economic and technological intelligence firm
Mathieu Andro, PhD in information and communication sciences, and coordinator of the Prime Minister's watch network
Jérôme Bondu, Managing Director of Inter-Ligere
Corinne Dupin, information professional, consultant and trainer at Ourouk
Anne solène Spido, president of Marcele Advisory's business intelligence consulting boutique, who has done a remarkable job of raising awareness of business intelligence on Linkedin.
The Actus veille hebdo (AVH) newsletter, on best practices in strategic intelligence and opinion analysis, produced by Lucien De Brot.

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