Fundamentals are excellent, but lacks some refined polish
April 04, 2018
Fundamentals are excellent, but lacks some refined polish
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Factiva
Factiva is being used by our Insight and Research departments as a content sourcing tool to fulfil client briefs and as a research tool to help us with our own marketing efforts, such as thought leadership pieces, sector reviews or to provide source material for opinion pieces. In these instances it helps address both an immediate client need but also acts as a very useful resource for answering ad-hoc requirements in house.
- Factiva has some quality news sources within its database. You know it's a robust, reliable and trustworthy source of content.
- The Boolean logic search engine can seem a little daunting at first, but it is a very powerful tool to help you get the most out of running searches. The syntax and query structure generally follows the same as most 'keyword search' engines, but it has some quirks that you need to be aware of - operators in lower case, or running multi word / phrase searches outside of quote marks.
- The filtering capability is simplistic but highly sophisticated. Filter content by source, region, language, company, industry and subject matter to really help hone results. The amount of back data readily available in the tool is impressive too meaning that running historical searches over large a timeframe is quick and easy.
- Results shown include a highlighted section to indicate where keywords have matched - a nice addition to help you quickly identify the relevant bits of content you need.
- You have the option to further tailor searches, and the ability to save individual searches for quick recall is a nice feature.
- The tool is fast. It can handle complex searches and mine data going back years very very quickly. Most impressive
- While the source list available is strong, there is limited if next to no social media in the tool. OK, it's Factiva, we know it doesn't do social media, but if it ran social media searches in the same way it handled news searches this would be a formidable tool for anyone to use.
- Export functionality is good but a little restrictive. While the tool exports a multitude of formats (headlines only, headlines and full text etc) the number of records you can export in one hit is relatively small if your initial search returns 1,000s of items. This is a shame given how powerful the tool is in running queries and building a deck of results.
Each of the tools I have described share the same kind of premise: the main thing they do is source and collect media content. Then to varying degrees they run filters against this content and produce a range of data visualisations and ways of slicing the data and content. Factiva's strength lies more in the sourcing of content than in the manipulation of the results (much like the others do with more sophisticated dashboards and visual interpretations). We chose it because of the integrity of its sourcing breadth. It doesn't matter so much about the display of results because the source material you're working with isn't as dynamic as say social media.