Who uses 2Dsearch?
2Dsearch is for researchers, students, information professionals and anyone who wants to solve complex search problems. This includes legal researchers, patent searchers and professionals working in media monitoring and recruitment/sourcing. If you need a transparent, efficient and reproducible search solution, 2Dsearch can help.
Information professionals
Evidence-based medicine relies on painstaking and meticulous searching of multiple literature sources. However:
Systematic literature reviews can take years to complete, and are often compromised by errors in the search strategies they rely on
Managing search strategies using tools such as Word or PDF introduces errors through unwanted conversion of control characters, removal of spaces, addition of line breaks etc.
Copy and pasting searches from documents into search boxes introduces further errors
Search strategies published as supplementary materials can become lost over time
Recruiters/sourcing professionals
Recruitment professionals rely on Boolean search as the basis of the candidate sourcing process. However, Boolean strings suffer from a number of fundamental shortcomings:
They are poor at communicating structure: without physical cues such as indentation, parentheses and other delimiters can become lost among other alphanumeric characters
They scale poorly: as queries grow in size, readability becomes progressively degraded
They are highly error-prone: even if syntax checking is provided, it is still possible to place parentheses incorrectly, changing the semantics of the whole expression
Researchers and students
Whether you are working in law, science or completing a PhD, you know how important it is to find and cite relevant prior art. This sounds simple but:
Keeping up with the accelerated rise in published research is almost impossible without continuous, rigorous searching
Traditional search interfaces use inefficient query builders and arcane syntax
The command-line paradigm forces you to think in a rigid procedural manner
Boolean logic may be conceptually simple, but it is notoriously counter intuitive and difficult to learn
Other applications
2Dsearch is for anyone who wants to find efficient solutions to complex search problems. This includes people working in patent search, media monitoring, competitive intelligence or indeed any profession where search needs to be transparent, efficient and reproducible. If you’d like to find out more about how 2Dsearch can help you, get in touch.