Usefulness?

I am working for an independent record label this summer as an intern, and I have convinced them to spring for DevonAgent. But before we plop the cash down and start digging in, I want to make sure that what I want to accomplish with DA is possible.

I’d like to be able to perform exhaustive searches for artists and albums throughout the summer that extend beyond google to delicious, blogs, flickr, select message boards, youtube, and myspace - to name a few.

The way I understand DA is this: I spend some initial time setting up the search parameters, which message boards, which blog search engines, etc. Then I could, theoritically, type the artist or album name into DA and a little while later have compiled results. Am I understanding DA right?

And can the searches be dynamic? In other words, once I’ve performed a search and visited those pages and compiled info for the label, can DA prioritize newer entries into the results when I run the same search a few days later?

If so, I will be very happy.

Thanks…John

Yes to all accounts. We have plugins for the major blog collators and other more specific search engines than Google and friends. If the record label has an internal website with search engine, you could write a plugin that will query that site too.
Furthermore you can run these queries unattended and get the new results from the previous search delivered every morning in your mailbox.

It may help to read up on the included tutorial regarding optimizing your search queries.

You can try it out for free, what’s stopping you now? :wink:

I think I’m getting the hang of it. I just made a Google Blog Search plugin. It was moderately fun. =)

This seems like exactly what I’m looking for.

One more question though: I’m a little confused as to how the searches retain when emailing new results. Do I have to leave DA up all the time? If not, how can I save the search results so that the next time I run DA and perform the same search, it will only compile new additions?

So yeah, we’ll be buying this as soon as the boss gets in on Monday. This is terrific.

To those of you who have used DA extensively: can you think of anything else, besides coding specific plugins to search YouTube/delicious/etc, that might be useful to me?

A summary of what I’m doing: I will be compiling a weekly digest of “buzz” on artists and releases. Lots of blog searches (I’m dreading trying to make a myspace plugin), standard news (pitchforkmedia, google news, magazines), viral site searches (delicious, furl), and media (flickr, youtube, etc).

Thanks for your thoughts and comments!

Just create a new search set (see Tools > Edit Search Sets…) and set up a schedule. The only requirement is that the computer is running and that you’re logged in and DA will be launched automatically.

Select “Only new pages” in the “Actions” tab of the search set.