I have struggled with the idea DA is more accurate then a google safari search. I saw the post today on the blog from m.macn.com and tried DA again and had the same frustrating experience. This is in contrast to DTpro which always delivers awesomeness.
Here is the case in point.
I am looking for a report on behalf of a local authority in Marlborough (NZ) by Craighead on a salmon farm application by a company called " King Salmon".
I search " Craighead king salmon marlborough" in Google and quick as a flash get as a high order result the following correct and helpful link enabling download of the report.
Indeed. DEVONagent is definitely overkill if you’re just looking for one link/website. Its advantages include e.g. bulk processing of LOTS of results, e.g. saving/archiving/exporting them or exporting reports. Or scheduled searching or crawling the web on its own. And of course using advanced filters or scanners.
I’ve set Bing as the default search engine for DEVONagent Pro. If I enter your query string into the URL address field and hit Return six results are presented. As Criss noted, I might well be satisfied at this point.
If I then do a fast Web search using the Bing plugin in DEVONagent Pro ((File > New Search), and enter the same query string, I quickly get six search results in just a few seconds.
I would have expected similar results had I made Google the default search engine in DEVONagent Pro Preferences, and also chose the Google plugin search set.
The advantage of using DEVONagent Pro this way is that when multiple results are presented, the DEVONagent Pro results have already been downloaded to my Mac and are immediately available for viewing, sending to DEVONthink or use of the Digest summary. I might find it useful to select a page in the Results list and press the See Also button, which would present a list of similar documents that may be in an open DEVONthink database, and similar Web documents. As Criss noted, DEVONagent Pro could be used to add additional filters. For example, if I knew the desired document was posted on the Web as a Microsoft Word document, I could filter the results to only display Word documents in the results.
If I were satisfied with the results of a fast search, I’m done. That’s often the case. If not, I would rerun the search using a search set for a deeper search of the Web, which of course would require DEVONagent Pro to inspect a much larger set of pages out on the Web and might take a long time. In this case, it would seem pointless to start with a deep search.
Yes I agree this is all awesome which is why I want to use DA. Also DA identifies links and file types allowing fast download management.
My issue is different.
This report in question was commissioned by our )NZ) Environmental Protection Agency. The agency has its own website that holds all reports on the King Salmon application. So is an obvious related link.
When I use the search query in DA as stated or add EPA ( so the search is "craighead king salmon marlborough epa )I never get any link to the EPA whether
directly or through see also. And that is the case whether I use Bing or Google.
On the other hand if I do the search query in google in safari it gets lots of results for the EPA site including a link to the report.
My question is why is a google search in DA producing different results then in safari for this same search query?. Presumably all DA does is set up a search set through google. Or is the fact that I am in safari and it knows I am in NZ I am getting better accuracy.
I notice that the search results in Google indicate that “craighead” is “missing”
So if I search in DEVONagent Pro for “king salmon marlborough epa” and also specify that DEVONagent should return not only HTML but also PDF files, then the results are the same as Google.
If you want to see the full set of reports by the NZ EPA about the proposal for expanded salmon farms, the search terms you used won’t lead to their discovery and download.
I’ve got my DA search options set to include HTML and a number of other filetypes, including PDF.
Still using the Bing search engine, I revised the original criteria to those used by korm.
Seven results were found. The highest ranked one didn’t contain the actual PDF reports, but linked to pages that included their links. I clicked on the links involving the final decision reports. (There were also links to earlier stages of the process, applications, hearings, etc.)
Final Report and Decision of the Board of Inquiry into the NZ King Salmon Proposal (pdf, 1.58mb)
Here’s the gold mine:
Final Report and Decision of the Board of Inquiry into the NZ King Salmon Proposal - Preamble Appendices A, B and C (pdf, 507kb)
Final Report and Decision of the Board of Inquiry into the NZ King Salmon Proposal - Appendices 1-3 (pdf, 6.3mb)
Final Report and Decision of the Board of Inquiry into the NZ King Salmon Proposal - Appendices 4-7 (pdf, 3.2mb)
Final Report and Decision of the Board of Inquiry into the NZ King Salmon Proposal - Appendices 8-11 (pdf, 5.7mb)
Question: Why didn’t the original search query identify those documents? Answer: They didn’t contain appropriate terms to download those results.
It would be tempting to use the generic titles of the reports and appendices as a phrase search. The results could be flaky, as that would use more than the ten word effective limit of the major search engines.
Thank you both for responding so fully. I can replicate your results. So I guess it is a issue of using the right search terms.
I can also see how useful the See Also is as a result of this exercise. The main thing though which DA helps me with is downloading multiple documents from a website
