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Search in any search engine

Posted: Thu May 05, 2011 6:48 pm
by webmaster
The attached project is a sample of how to use two of the new features: the "Execute Caller's Children" action and the "Setup HTML". It's a project that can be used as a template or imported into an existing one. Contains an actions tree called "Search" that when invoked from a "Execute Actions Tree" action, behaves as an action that searches a list of terms in any search engine and executes it's child nodes after performing each search.

All you need to do is create two kinds: one that selects an input box (where you would type your search terms) and one that selects a search button (the one that you would click to perform a search). Then fill up the SearchTerms table with a list of search terms you want it to search for (don't forget to click the "Save" button after). And then create an actions tree and add an "Execute Actions Tree" that executes the "Search" actions tree.

After this you can add any kind of actions you want under the "Execute Actions Tree" action and they will be executed after every search. You could add an "Extract" action to extract items from the search results, or add a "Repeat" and a "Navigate" under it that navigates through result pages. Et cetera...

Notice that the "Execute Actions Tree" has a "Wait" action of 1 second. This is made for engines such as Google that fill up the results list after the page has completed loading. You can lower it or set it to 0 depending on your search engine or keep it there just to be safe.