Learn more about Search

Purpose
Find All Forecasts or just Insights, Sources or Members using keywords.

Better results
There are several strategies you can employ to obtain better results.

Search terms:

• Avoid overly complex queries, simple AND/OR queries will work.
• Don't search for common words like future, trends etc.
• Keep your search term short. Long phrases will reduce your findings. Simplify the search query by removing unnecessary words
• Try singular keywords and plurals to obtain different results
• Try other keywords that are likely associated with your search term or at a higher level. For instance, if searching for 'pavements' try 'walkways' or chunking up to 'streets' and 'roads' or chunk up further to 'cities'
• Check that you entered search terms, blank searches are not allowed
• Check for special characters and symbols that are not part of a word
• Use speech marks correctly to group phrases together, ensure speech marks are closed
• Replace inverted commas (') with speech marks (")

Forecasts
By automatically extracting future related statements from 'Insights' (web articles, PPT slides, and PDF reports), the system creates instant forward ‘Forecasts' about probable and possible future world conditions and turns these into literature reviews, desk research, and reports, tag clouds, tree and mind-maps at will.

A forward 'Forecast' is a statement about the future of a single, relevant topic that is automatically extracted from a publicly available source enriched with collected attributes e.g. country or time horizon. Example: 'By 2020 China will be the largest economy in the world'.

The system's data model uses many thousands of forward FORECASTS, gleaned from our extensive database of added Insights since January 2012 and turns embedded information into future knowledge. We are continuing to add to this database at the rate of 900+ new forward FORECASTS per week through our global scanning network of contributors and the robot's scanning of thousands of predetermined sources.

By querying the FORECASTS database with well-constructed, search terms the system will present the gist of the subject's future in an easily read listing. The search can be 'Refined' with specific 'Search words', 'Country', 'Start and End Year, 'Sector'. You can also Search for 'Statistics only', just for 'Professional reports' or to separate 'Business as Usual, Probable, Possible or Potential' futures as the basis for creating future scenarios.

Insights
Searching for Insights reveals the listing of all the raw scan hits added to the system by contributors and the robot since 2002.

Your scanning focus will likely cover - what competitors are doing, what is happening in the industry and how might your competitors respond, what is happening more generally with industry and government policy, and then broader societal and global trends. The emphasis you put on each segment will depend on what you need, but you should always spend time looking at global trends - this is the area that sometimes gets dismissed because people are busy and want to know what is going to affect their work tomorrow rather than in ten years time. But, the global trends drive the former and you need to understand them first.

Look for Insights about:

• Your industry and its operating environment.
• Your services and how they might evolve.
• Your clients and how their expectations might change.
• Issues that likely affect your workforce and your staff.
• Emerging and converging technologies.
• Emerging shifts in what we think is "business as usual".

Then, use the system to begin planning your response. Learn more about how to do this here.

Sources
Search for the organizations and people you have added to the system and either:

• Open 'News', 'RSS' or 'Tweets etc. to review latest announcements on the Internet and then ADD INSIGHT to the system of importance to you or,
• Open 'Plan' or 'Act' to conduct competitive analysis.

Members
Input a person's name or keyword e.g. scenario. You will be shown a list of matching people. You can 'Refine this search and find people with matching 'search words', by 'country', 'sector', 'skills', and 'group'.

Web Searches
When you search the service an additional drop-down under Web Searches appears in the left-hand navigation bar. You can use this to find more trends, uncertainties and surprises on your keyword from a general 'Web' and 'News' search or Blogs, Books and Patent searches on the Internet.

In addition, Web Searches provides instant access to Statista Infographics, Google Trends and Insights providing a high-level and quick and dirty means to see whether these point in the same direction as our 'Timeline', or not. If they do, then this is a strong, triangulated signal of emerging change. If they don't, you will need to do further research to evaluate which is the most likely future direction of your search word.

Do-it-yourself
You can search for professional reports, articles and PowerPoint's on the Internet using your search term as follows:

your 'search term' AND filetype:PDF

Then Add as an Insight to the system. The system will automatically extract any FORECASTS found within the report or article or PowerPoint meaning that you will save considerable time in reading documents. Please note that certain types of PDF's cannot be read by our Extractor software and some reports will give you similar or the same forecasts that we have already found. PowerPoint's too rarely contain future indicators but we provide this facility for those that do.

Then research this database and all of your findings will be displayed.

Our experience is that in short-order you can build your own research on any topic faster and better than any human.

Contact us
Do feel free to contact us if you have queries, want to suggest further refinements to the service, want us to train you or to ask for help in providing you with outsourced services using the free-form message box below.