With the introduction of the latest version of our software we were able to take advantage of dtSearch’s amazing development work and incorporate their andany operator. The andany operator solves a very complex search problem. Think of this problem, you want to find a recipe to use up some bananas but you are sick of eating banana bread.
The standard response would be to search for banana not banana bread. However, suppose someone has a recipe for the best banana pudding in the world but it is on the same page with a comment about how tiring they have found banana bread. Your search expression would exclude that page.
The alternative search would be for banana andany banana bread. This search would first search and find all pages that mention the word banana and then it would count and identify all instances of the phrase banana bread on those pages. If the frequency count is the same then you can conclude that the only mention of banana on a particular page is in the context of banana bread. However, if the frequency count of banana is greater than the frequency count of banana bread you just might want to explore that particular page.
For a more on target example, consider the problem faced by Li, Lundholm and Minnis. The wanted to identify competitive intensity described in 10-K filings. They used code they developed to identify all 10-K filings with instances of words rooted in competition and counted their frequency in each document. Their code allowed them to also count instances of phrases like less competition. This would be hard to replicate without access to their code because the only search one could develop without using the andany operator would be competition and not less competition. So if we assume our search focus is a document/paragraph the search will look for all documents/paragraphs that have the word competition but exclude the document/paragraph if they also have the phrase less competition.
The same search using the andany operator would be competition andany less competition. This search would return documents/paragraphs selected on the basis of the word competition and also count all instances of the phrase less competition.
The Li et al paper was an inspiration for finding a search engine that could address their research strategy without having to learn to program to collect the same data. In tests we ran to validate the superb value that dtSearch would bring to directEDGAR we found significant documents that would be excluded from the results by using the not operator where competition words significantly exceeded phrases like less competition.