Portfolio produces the Universities Online Reputation Audit using technology developed by its sister company, Spectrum, whose expertise in sophisticated search engine tools allows it to conduct and aggregate complex searches.  The resulting URLs are then ‘scraped’ to extract data for automated analysis.  This is carried out using advanced text mining systems developed by Spectrum that incorporate sentiment ‘dictionaries’ which, like the highly effective Spam filters now coming into use, take advantage of conditional probability based on Bayesian statistics and neural networks to continuously improve their analysis. 

Unlike many companies that track blogs and other social media, Spectrum’s technologies are developed by people with decades of experience in measuring and evaluating media, such as editorial coverage, and who truly understand content.  Importantly, the Universities Online Reputation Audit is based on thousands of pieces of online news, reviews and blogs, which the aggregated searches inherently rank by popularity.  While no system can ever cover the entire web, which is constantly changing, the Spectrum approach creates a very large sample offering robust data.