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Full-text access to business information remains one of the fastest growing arenas for online searching. Prominent among the many options for searching newspapers, trade journals, newswires, newsletters, and other document types are Dow Jones Text-Search Services and DowQuest, offered by Dow Jones News/Retrieval.
DowQuest is no longer the latest innovation in online searching, and Dow Jones Text-Search Services is not the most comprehensive multifile approach to full-text business information. They do represent, however, impressive methods to search business text when one wants access to a broad array of databases or a simple entree into current literature.
What interests me most is that DowQuest and Text-Search are commonly designated as a two-level searching system. When you are looking for a few relevant stories on a specific topic or sampling the climate of opinion on a general one, choose DowQuest. When you want more depth in your search or require the complexity offered by a command-driven online searching system, use Dow Tones Text-Search. Do these two searching methods fill these roles? What are the specific reasons to prefer one option over the other? Can they effectively be used in tandem? As one of the few commercially available non-Boolean end-user systems, how effectively does DowQuest work and what are the best approaches to using it?
DESCRIPTIONS OF THE SERVICES
Text-Search Services includes over a thousand full-text sources searchable in either a menu-driven or command version. These sources include the following: selected portions of Dow Jones News, Wall Street Journal, (including Asian and Europe editions), Barron's, Washington Post, IAC's Business Library, McGraw-Hill Publications, Los Angeles Times, Business Week, Predicasts newsletters, regional sources from Business Dateline, and over 100 regional newspapers and other publications from DataTimes. The Text command language is STAIRS-based and resembles BRS and Data-Star in its searching capabilities. Sources vary in coverage dates from Dow Jones News (1979-present) to the more recently added European and Asian Wall Street Journals. Text-Search offers most of the advantages of full-featured online services, including field and proximity searching, sorting, limiting by various parameters, and custom output. It also offers multifile searching on all of the available sources or up to four selected files.
DowQuest is a non-Boolean search system in which search requests are presented in natural language. Approaches such as...