Private Equity Info Blog

Our keyword search engines use an exact text string matching method. That is, when you keyword search the portfolio companies business descriptions or the professional bios, by default, the search engine will find all occurrences that exactly match the text in your search query.

For example, searching for the word print will result in printing, printer, reprint, etc. While this can be favorable (see last blog post), the downside is that searching for words like tractor will also produce results for contractor.

To avoid this, we also support the use of quotation marks around your search phrase to limit the search to exactly that phrase and not the text string within another word. For example, searching for “tractor” in quotes, would NOT result in occurrences of contractor. It would only give you results for the word tractor as a stand alone word.

Understanding these nuisances should help you get better search results, more efficeintly.