The Gridstone platform took a quantum leap forward recently when our Search feature came out of Beta. Thanks a million to all the users who tried it and provided their suggestions and feedback. To illustrate some unique aspects of Gridstone’s search, I search for “INFY attrition” – i.e., commentary about attrition for Infosys Technologies (NASDAQ: INFY).

Take a look at the results screen here. In the rest of this post I will explain how Gridstone's search is way ahead of any other way of searching financial information.

First, the search engine intelligently parsed my search term into a ticker and a keyword, and filtered its results to comments made by Infosys (INFY).

Second, it returned the paragraphs that spoke about attrition, not links to documents that matched my search term (which is what most search engines do). A search for attrition in a company like Infosys will most likely match all documents, and the results will be of little use to me at all. Instead, here I can read the exact commentary pertaining to attrition right on the results screen.

Third, the search engine provided me with useful ways in which I could slice-and-dice my results further, allowing me to chunk the results into bite-sized sets for easier consumption. This concept, called Guided Navigation, is really useful in navigating a large search result set.

In this example, I can see that there were 37 comments that were “Actuals” or explanatory in nature, while 5 were forward-looking, or “Guidance”. I can also see the distribution by Commentator, Document Type, or Event Type. Interested in just forward-looking comments so that you can make a better guesstimate for future attrition? By just clicking on “Guidance”, I can filter my results to just comments that are tagged “Guidance”.

I can also see that Infosys has been categorized under Technology > IT Services by Gridstone. If I’m interested in commentary on this subject by other companies in the same industry, I just have to click IT Services, and I can ‘zoom out’ to see what other players in the industry say about attrition.

To illustrate the last feature in Gridstone’s search engine, I run a search for “Capex SNDK”. Capital Expenditure is a very important aspect of any Semiconductor company like Sandisk (SNDK). Take a look at the results page:

Beyond the first two snippets where the exact term “Capex” was found, Gridstone subsequently returned paragraphs with terms like “investment”, “capital equipment”, “capital expenditures”, “purchase” and “properties”. Therefore, I didn’t have to search separately for every term that meant Capex – Gridstone’s search engine intelligently understood my query, and returned a much richer set of search results. Of course, through the “Advanced Search” link, I could’ve search for an exact phrase of combination of words.

Lastly, the Search Engine searches across all documents in the Gridstone system. That means it searches across conference call transcripts, SEC filings like Ks and Qs, Press Releases, etc. Surprisingly, this is unique in itself!

We’ve been working hard on this feature for the past 6-8 months, and thanks for useful feedback from users, we think we have something that truly unique and powerful – a tool that really gives users ‘more time to think’. As always, feedback and suggestions are welcome!