Support & FAQ
In the below section we try to address the most pressing questions regarding the usage of Varia Research. If you have further questions or feedback regarding features and capabilities, do not hesitate to reach out via Email, or via our Slack Community!
Varia Research
Support
In Varia Research, you can add content to your Interim or Dossiers from the Feeds section inside of the application, or from anywhere on the internet, using our bookmarklet.
A bookmarklet is an easy way to execute a small task or program with the click of a button, inside a browser. Here is how to make that work:
1) Enable the bookmarks/favorites bar in your browser
2) Add the Varia Research bookmarklet to your browser
3) Save content from all over the internet with one click
The first step is slightly different for each browser, the rest and general logic of the bookmarklet are the same everywhere.
If you don’t want to work with the bookmarks/favorites bar, you can also add the Varia Research bookmarklet to your normal bookmark/favorites library, however this will be less efficient (and not covered here).
1) Enable the bookmarks/favorites bar in your browser
This can be slightly different for each browser, for some, the bookmark or favorite bar is already active per default, for others (e.g. Safari) it has to be activated.
Chrome: navigate to settings -> appearance and activate the „show bookmarks bar“ toggle. This will then bring the „bookmarks bar“ into your browser at the top, right beneath the URL field, highlighted in red below.
Safari: is calling the bookmarks bar „favorites bar“. You can find it under View -> Show favorites bar.
Firefox: right-click anywhere in the top section of Firefox, to open the general context menu. Then select Bookmarks Toolbar -> Always Show. The bookmarks toolbar will then appear as shown in the Chrome example.
Edge: there the bookmarks bar is also called favorites bar, but it has the exact same functionalities. To activate it, navigate to your settings -> appearance -> Show favorites bar -> always:
2) Add the Varia Research bookmarklet to your browser
Now that the bookmarks/favorites bar is enabled in your browser, you can simply drag and drop the Varia Research bookmarklet into there. The bookmarklet itself can be found inside Varia Research.
3) Save content from all over the internet with one click
As you have the bookmarklet added to your browser, you can not add content from all over the internet directily into one of your Varia Research Dossiers – or to your Interim storage. Next to adding content, you can also directly add tags and marks.
In Varia Research, you can add individual RSS feeds, to follow specific sources.
RSS stands for „Really Simple Syndication“ and allows any site to provide a stream of content in a defined format, so that it can easily be processed by feed readers and tools like Varia Research.
To find out whether a source that you want to follow offers an RSS feed, search for „RSS“ on their site, or via Google. E.g. Reuters has a vast collection of RSS feeds that you can follow.
Google Alerts is another popular tool, to follow very specific issues, via the Google search engine. Each Google Alert that one has, can either be delivered to the user’s email inbox, or it can be turned into an RSS feed. This allows you to add all your Google Alerts to Varia Research and to monitor them in parallel. For users with multiple Google Alerts, this might be very handy, as the alerts will no longer clog up their inbox.
For more guidance on how to add a Google Alert as RSS feed to Varia Research, check the short video below:
FAQ
For now 3 feed types are available,
- Varia feeds
- RSS feeds
- Bing News feeds
Each has its own advantages and depending on what news or source you want to monitor, one or the other of the feed types might be the right one for you.
Here is a short description of each and an example for what it can be used.
Varia feeds: are covering a global source catalog of around 400 leading news sources (growing). The content is pre-processed by our machine learning pipeline, which means that all the content in the Varia feeds has the machine learning features available already in the feed. Documents from other feeds have to be added to the Interim or a Dossier first, in order for machine learning or NLP features to be available.
If you can't find the source you would want to see in Varia feeds, do not hesitate to reach out to us, so that we can screen and potentially add it.
Best for: in Varia feeds you cannot filter (search) for classic keywords, but you can filter for entities - meaning people, organizations, locations, or other types of entities. This makes Varia feeds well suited to follow e.g. specific companies or people. To restrict the results further, Varia feeds allow to filter for specific topics, languages (EN or DE), or source websites.
RSS feeds: In Varia Research, you can add individual RSS feeds, to follow specific sources.
RSS stands for „Really Simple Syndication“ and allows any site to provide a stream of content in a defined format, so that it can easily be processed by feed readers and tools like Varia Research.
Best for: the internet is vast and we can't monitor absolutely all sources for all users. So if you have a specific source that you want to follow dedicated in one feed - also narrowed down to the way they present the content in their stream, RSS is the way to go.
To find out whether a source that you want to follow offers an RSS feed, search for „RSS“ on their site, or via Google. E.g. Reuters has a vast collection of RSS feeds that you can follow.
See the "Creating an RSS feed from a Google Alert" section in the above support documentation for more info on how to add RSS feeds.
Bing News feeds: are based on the Bing News API and cover their entire news catalog. So the sources behind this are vastly broader, when compared to the Varia feeds. You might here also find content from small outlets or blogs, things not covered in the Varia feeds. Bing News feeds allow you to filter for specific sites and for language (EN or DE).
Bing News feeds are limited to 1 per user on the free plan and the total amount of requests per day are also metered for free and paid plans.
Best for: Keyword based search of any topic. With the broad source base of Bing News, you will find relevant content for almost all topics. Make sure to have your search query match the language of the content you want returned, for best results.
If there are other feed types that you would like to see appear in Varia Research, please let us know, we are happy to look into such feedback & requests !