See Also.. is not working for selections

I’m evaluating a trial version of the software to see if I want to buy it. So far I have got See Also… to work for web pages (it finds related emails and similar webpages, for example) and emails (vice versa). Very impressive.

So I thought I’d take it a step further and try it out on a selected piece of text (first using Stickies, then when that didn’t work, TextEdit). The text was “Passport to Pimlico”, which is a UK comedy film from the 1950s.

I right-clicked the selection then chose the “…See Also…” link. The window opens, but it says “No results found”. Repeatedly. (I’m connected via broadband, and I have all the Web Search options checked in Preferences).

What am I doing wrong? I would have expected Devonsphere to come up with a selection of web pages about the movie, e.g. IMDB, etc.

See Also is able to find…

  • websites related to the current one
  • local documents similar to the current document/selection

…but it can’t find websites similar to the selection.

Would it work if I switched from “See Also…” to “Search” instead? I’m more than half impressed with DEVONsphere already, but a Google search WITHOUT using a browser would be the icing on the cake for me. I would DEFINITELY purchase!

At the moment, Glims does the job very well indeed, but I have to start to enter a search term in the Google field of Safari for Glims to do its magic; then there’s Alfred, which has Google search built in, but again, you have to invoke Alfred then copy/paste, before it offers to invoke a Google search.

It’s all a bit remote from being able to right-click selected text in any document and use the Services menu to launch an app which will Search the web for that bit of selected text. That’s what initially excited me about DEVONsphere, but you’re saying it won’t actually do that?

(Question: you’re on a web page and DEVONsphere finds related web pages - how does it do that? Shouldn’t it be able to do that if you aren’t in a browser to begin with?)

Searching both local documents and the web concurrently is of course possible.

It’s retrieving related web sites from e.g. Google, therefore a URL is required.

It’s retrieving related web sites from e.g. Google, therefore a URL is required.

Yes, but it doesn’t need a URL to just do a Google search, and retrieve a list of related web sites it could display in its own window?

I’m thinking of:

  1. DEVONsphere takes the selected text
  2. It does a background Google search using that
  3. If retrieves the list of URLs from Google and displays them like it does already for related web pages

Is there something I’m missing here?

That’s basically identical to DEVONsphere Express’ web search. The only difference is that it’s not performed automatically.

That’s a pity. As it’s the same as the web search it already does, to do the same thing on selected text would be a great boon.

We’ll consider this for future releases but as far as I remember it’s the first request of its kind.

I already have DevonSphere as I found it to be inexpensive to try out so it wouldn’t net you any new revenue. However, I would appreciate such a feature.

On a separate but similar note, I’m always disappointed that the contextual menu ‘search with google’ forces the search through Safari (which I tend not to use).

That’s a system-wide Service provided by OS X, rather than something provided by DEVON. You could disable this Service in System Preferences, but to my knowledge there is no way to change which browser is used and/or the search provider.

One might Search with Google for “OSX ‘search with’ service” and find, for example.

I wonder if one of those free launcher apps which help you Search / Open / Find etc using your keyboard, would do that? I use Alfred, which might simply search using any browser you’ve got open? I don’t know, as I use Safari - in 32-bit mode, and empty out its webpage previews now and then, and kill its Safari Web Content whenever my RAM is running low. Otherwise, Safari is fine for me :slight_smile: