Solarthermalworld.org Offers New and Advanced Search Tool
Solarthermalworld.org is worldwide one of the largest websites dedicated to solar heating and cooling. Since its creation in 2008, the web portal has grown into a database of around 3,500 news articles, scientific papers, studies and presentations on a wide range of topics. With 12,000 unique visitors a month and 6,000 subscribers to the monthly newsletter, solarthermalworld.org reaches a high number of industry professionals, scientists, experts from planning institutes, as well as public officials. Since April 2014, an advanced search tool has also helped visitors to quickly find relevant topics, projects, technologies, markets and trends (see the column on the left).
The tool combines the keyword search box and the tag-based filter, which had so far been used independently to search the database. Now, the user can filter entries based on the following categories:
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Keyword
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Type (News or Non news terms)
The web portal includes around 960 “news” by journalists from around the world and, under “non news terms”, much background information in the form of studies, publications and presentations.
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Country
Type the first letters of your country and choose from a drop-down list.
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Market Sectors
Some of the items you can choose from the drop-down menu:
Air Heating / District Heating / Domestic Hot Water and Heating / Heat
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Six Pillars (of market development)
You can choose between:
Awareness Raising / Certification / Finance and Incentives / Policy / Standards / Training and Education
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From / To Date
Click and select the respective dates from the calendar.
What is special about the search result is how it can be arranged on the screen: News and documents can be sorted by either Relevance (number of clicks) – for example, High to low – or Date created, for example, Newest first.
In addition to news and background articles, you will find a number of other services on the website, all focusing on the solar heating and cooling sector. For example, you can subscribe to the solarthermalworld.org newsletter, which contains a monthly summary of the latest solar heating and cooling news from around the globe – at no cost to you. The archive of all newsletters is available online, too. The Calendar of Events lists all upcoming events related to solar thermal. And the database of incentive programmes, which currently lists 42 programmes from 30 countries, let you keep track of the different incentive schemes from around the world.
You can also use your preferred social media network to get your daily dose of solarthermalworld.org news. The website has 9,500 fans on Facebook, 1,550 followers on Twitter and 552 members on LinkedIn.
