Searching inside an existing topic can help you find specific mentions of your monitoring subject. For example, your general topic might be Starbucks, but you only need mentions of Starbucks espresso for a detailed analysis of the coffee brand's espresso beverages.

To use the search function inside a topic, go to your topic Mentions. You will see three options on the right-hand sidebar:

The search bar inside the topic uses the same operators as the query step during the creation of a new topic, such as basic operators:

AND — to find words side by side — book AND kindle

OR — to find different versions or combinations — book OR ipad

Brackets ( ) — to group words together — (book OR ipad) AND buy

Quotation marks " " — to find an exact keyphrase — "buy ipad mini"

/N — to mark distance between words — buy /1 ebook

Stop-words/phrases — to exclude unnecessary words — magazine -textbook-
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​Advanced operators and Author-based operators.

You can expand the search field to make it easier to formulate your query:

⚠️ The search field has a character limit of 2500.

1. Find all mentions on a particular subject.

For example, let's imagine you created a general topic page for coffee. Your current task requires you to only analyze mentions of espresso and Americano beverages. To focus on these, put espresso OR americano in the search field and collect all mentions of these beverages.

💡 Tag your mentions to make them easier to find and analyze later. To avoid having to tag manually, you can automate the process using Rules. You can learn more about Rules here.

2. Temporarily exclude mentions from your stream

You might want to remove all mentions of decaffeinated beverages from your stream. To do so, use stop-words like -decaf and -decaffeinated in your search query. Your internal topic filter is ready!

3. Find a specific event or post in your topic

Let's say you're looking for a specific mention. Put the phrase you are looking for, for example, "Starting my day off with a Starbucks" into your search field to see the mention.

Under the search bar, you can see two tabs: "Words" and "Tags."

The Words tab contains keywords, hashtags and page handles/titles that frequently crop up in your text mentions. For example: youscan, #youscan, @youscan

The Tags tab contains the most popular mention tags in your topic. You can learn more about working with tags here.

You can switch between the two tabs and click on the words and tags of interest to filter the mention stream by that word or tag.

How do YouScan filters work?
​How to customize your mention stream to work on your current task?