Channel Fine Tuning
Once a channel has been set up you might find that there are articles that add noise to the channel. Here are some tips on things to look for and use to remove noise from one of your channels.
Channel Definition Introduction
There are a few things that can help fine tune your channel immediately. Typically this involves setting up a channel stage to exclude specific things that will remove articles from the channel news result.
Click on the edit tab to open up the channel editor and scroll down to the bottom of the editor page.
Once you are at the bottom of the editor, click on AND to add a new channel stage box. Once the new channel stage opens up, click on the ANY OF THESE box in the upper left corner and it will switch to NONE OF THESE.
Anything you put in this channel stage will be excluded from the results.
Fine Tuning Tips
Typically Excluded
A very useful entity for de-cluttering a channel is the Typically Excluded - All entity which is a rollup of topics that you normally do not want to see. Some examples are Accidents, Events, Company Filings and Stock Market Comments. Add this entity to the exclusion box to immediately remove a lot of noise from your channel.
More information is available in the Channel Setup Walkthrough
Source Categories
All of the sources are categorized using source categories which can be used in the channel definition to include or exclude those types of sources.
Social Media
The first set of source categories to consider removing are the ones associated with blogs and social media sources.
- Blogs & Social Media (Sources considered to be part of social media)
Note
The top category (Blogs & Social Media) will remove everything below it when it is included in the exclusion box.
Company/Industry Publications
The next set to consider are associated with company and industry publications. These can be enormously useful for certain types of use cases, but can also add noise if you are just looking for news.
Tip
Remember that you can use the lower level source categories to exclude that specific type. Tenders & RFPs for instance is almost always noise.
Government Sources
Articles published by Government, Academic, and/or University sources are covered by this set of source categories.
Financial Research
Financial Research publications are covered by this source category.
News Sources
A quick shortcut to fine tuning a channel would be to only use News source categories as an included entity for the channel.
Tip
- You can include News in one channel stage and exclude some of the sub-categories in the exclusion box.
- Regional/Local is a great source category for finding local news articles about specific topics or companies.
Specific Article Research
A more time consuming, but still effective way to fine tune a channel is to review articles that you do not want to have included in the channel individually, figure out the main characteristic that is associated with the article that can be used to exclude it from the channel news.
Article Source
An easy item to review is the source associated with the article.
Since the source is visable in the Article Card at all time, you can review it quickly. If the source is something that can be explicitly excluded without changing the desired content in the channel, you can edit the channel and add the specific source to the exclusion box.
Tip
A source is always associated with a Contributor. In the Article Card, a source is shown consisting of two parts. The name before the / is a link to the Contributor. If you exclude the contributor, every source associated with that contributor will be removed. When you search for the source, the contributor will come up in the preview for the search as you type. If you want to exclude all sources from that contributor, select the contributor, not the full source name.
Topics
The second way to analyze an article to help reduce noise is to open up the Topics Entity Type to show the specific topics associated with the article.
Look through the specific topics shown to see if there are any that can be exluded without changing the quality of your news results for the channel. If you find any that make sense to put into the exlusion box, edit your channel and add the topic to the box.
Text Exclusions
Sometimes a set of articles will be included in a channel that can be excluded by a specific text term. You can use Text Search to include or exclude specific text terms within a channel definition. In some cases an included text term will have variations that need to be excluded. Put the variations into the exclusion box to remove them from the channel news result.
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