Struggling with Search Sets and/or Plugins

DEVONagent Tips
1

I’ve toyed around for an hour or so, watched tutorials, and checked out the Plugin tutorial on Macdrifter and I cannot seem to grok quite how to accomplish either of my use cases.

I’m a wine enthusiast and when I someone mentions a wine I’d like to run some (very different) kinds of investigations:

  1. Search for tasting notes on that wine (i.e. text string) on a few sites:
    a. Cellartracker has a specific URL pattern for Tasting Notes that takes the wine string (with +)
    b. Wineberserkers has a posting pattern that starts with "TN: " and the wine string

  2. Search for places that sell the wine to get to their pages: this a a list of about 20 sites, some have pattern driven search engines, but I want the search results page… really cool would be if I could even ID that there’s actually a dollar sign somewhere on that page visible to the rendered page (looking for $36.99 where I don’t know the 36.99 yet).

So I’ve created search sets based on crawl and zero results are returned for something very common. When I change it to search, I get results from wikipedia and no, I don’t have ANY other plugins selected and no link follow.

I’m guessing I’m just messing up on some basic concepts here. Can someone point me to a decent overview of how to accomplish what I’m looking for?

2

The “Crawl” mode scans only the added URLs (and follows links if enabled). Crawling plus following of links can be very slow but the results are precise & up to date.

The “Search” mode uses the search results provided by e.g. Google & Bing for the specified URL and is therefore a lot faster. But the results might vary, e.g. some domains block Google/Bing or the results are outdated.

The ideal solution are probably plugins for each site but this requires a decent amount of work (and knowledge of HTML).

3

Mike -

I have similar goals for searching (albeit not for wine).

Yes, DA can do a lot, but it can do not everything we might want for searching.
I’ve found it necessary to combine DA with other, complimentary, search tools.
The combination is more powerful than any one search tool alone.

Talking about other products in detail would be outside the scope of this forum.
So, if you want to discuss, I’m happy to do that by private message or email.