Today, Pulsar is extending the character limit for Boolean queries from 2048 to 5000 characters! This means it’s now possible to create searches that are twice as long as before. This is a significant step in our Pulsar 3.0 journey, and reinforces one of our key objectives for Pulsar 3.0 - Extreme Relevance. And with high precision and advanced querying capabilities, users can now get more meaningful and relevant answers to their questions.
What does this mean for you?
The ability to create larger queries means more opportunities to capture terms that might have been left on the cutting room floor before. Want to put in a bunch of common misspellings? Go for it! Looking for every model of a particular car? Why not include the terms too with more space? More characters means more possibilities for crafting the perfect search, whether you’re a big company looking to get every mention of your brand, or a solo journalist on the scoop for how people talk deeply and sometimes cryptically about your subject.
It is important to remember, though, that our current restrictions on search complexity that may stop you before the character counter does, will still apply. When we talk about complexity, we’re talking about using many types of operators in conjunction with one another to create queries that can pick up incredibly particular phrases. A bunch of words in OR together might not be so complex, but mixing several ANDs in between ORs with a big NOT blacklist might start to grow in complexity quickly! The good news is, with more characters available, you may not need to be as complex to save that extra ten characters!
We also acknowledge that it might get a bit dizzying once you get to that 3567th character, so to help you along, we've added a character counter so you can easily keep track of where you are in your search length.
But that's not all! If you've ever used some of our special data sources in your Topic searches, like Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitch, you may have noticed the requirement to keep your search terms limited to 10 groups of keywords. To pair with our new boolean character extension, we've also doubled this limit to 20 groups of keywords, meaning you can expand your searches to capture more data about a particular subject across these data sources too!
This isn't just for new searches, by the way. You can go back and update any of your currently running searches to take full advantage of these new updates.
As always, if you have any questions, reach out to us via the in-app support function, or check out the articles below for more details on boolean, special sources, and character limits.