Announcing Geographic Search with Location Filters
March 11, 2016Today we are pleased to release geographic search features in the form of location filters. We’ve received quite a few requests for these features, in particular from reporters who’s beats cover particular geographic areas like Pennsylvania or Silicon Valley. A location filter consists of one of the following kinds of criteria:
- Point (WGS84 latitude/longitude) and range in miles
- US state
A point and range defines a circular area in which a company address must be located. This criteria can be used to represent a city, metropolitan area or region (within or across states). A state based location filter works by exact match on the state field of the normalized company address, so it accurately follows a state border.
Location filters include only SEC documents in this first release. In the future we will include patents and court dockets in the same filters. Patents would either be by the more approximate place name and state given in the patent, or by a more exacting address available via SEC filings for the same company if available. Court dockets would similarly be by address of company(s) mentioned in the docket title. To do this we need more exacting company entity tagging and joining, which will also enable us to offer cross-source company filters.
To support experimentation and ad hoc research with locations, we allow you to save multiple, and use them repeatable by simply selecting one from your locations list. Because locations are saved with your account, we require you to be logged in to use location filters. When logged in, we also support fast selection of any state by including the two-letter, capitalized USPS/ANSI state code in the query text, e.g. “CA press releases”.
Presently we will only lookup lat./lon. for your current browser/device location, with your permission. In the future we will offer general address and/or zip code lookup, but for now you can manually enter any desired location in the US as decimal degrees latitude/longitude. Wikipedia for one lists lat./lon. for most US cities. Location filtered searches may also be shared by URL. The recipient will be prompted to login, but can then save the location, and if desired, the search.
We store one address per company. Companies do change addresses (e.g. headquarters) occasionally, so a change of address into the range of a location filter will logically bring with it all SEC filings for a given company. We believe it would be undesirable to alert you on potentially many old SEC filings, so we exclude all but the latest filings from alerts in this scenario.
Here is the set of searches with location filters provided in the above screenshot:
Please let us know what you think of the new location filters feature or how we might refine it to better serve your needs!
Update 2016-3-15: Updated location dialog sample and clarified use of point and range criteria.