Search Assistant

[TheSaint]

Search Assistant v1.3 is a program I use to take the hassle out of repetitive web site searching. It is now available to the Forum for the first time.

Do you find yourself often searching for the same items at one or more web sites (i.e. books, cd's, dvd's, etc). My program let's you create a named list with as many items as you like on it, which you can use to search at one or more sites.

THE CATCH - my program is not perfect, but I find it works well ... once you know its limitations -

1) It relies on the web site's search input being in a visible section at the top of the web page, and always at the same position. In other words, it uses mouse coordinates to enter search text.

2) Sometimes the name of a new page is not recognised, so you need to set the coordinates again.

3) Scrolling also has issues with a new page name sometimes.

4) Sometimes the mini search dialog is slow to appear after clicking in a input.

You might think these issues make the program not worth bothering with, but all I can say is - TRY IT AND SEE. I think you'll be surprised at how much time and fuss it saves ... no more typing, typing errors or remembering, etc!

By the way, if you can think of a way to improve things, then please share!

Please follow the instructions within the program carefully, but basically you need to -

1) Start the program.

2) Make sure your web page is visible behind the main dialog and that you are at the very top of the page (i.e. click HOME), and more importantly - that your search input will be visible when the dialog closes.

3) Click BEGIN, and after reading the information dialog and closing it (OK), click somewhere in the web page search input (i.e. center and middle recommended).

4) If the (mini) Search Dialog hasn't appeared, you may need to click again in the search input ... one or more times (until it does).

5) Click NEXT to enter the first search item in the input.

6) If you wish, use the SCROLL button to move down through the search results.

7) Either click NEXT to move on to your next search, or RESET if you need to re-indicate the mouse coordinates, or RESET and then STOP to finish and return to the main dialog. Before clicking NEXT, you might like to manually choose which item is searched for next - rather than rely on the auto advancement to next on the list (alphabetically).

Search Assistant

Screenshots

Main Dialog

Search Dialog (using with Firefox browser - full screen 800x600)

Example of a typical web page search input

ENJOY!

Edited March 1, 2009 by TheSaint

[TheSaint]

Search Assistant has been updated to v1.4. This is a kind of fix or major improvement if you like. The program was having trouble getting the correct window title for some web pages, so anyway, whilst trying to improve this quirk I came across an element with window handles that hadn't caught my attention before - namely that the handle stayed the same, even when the window title changed. This was a revelation to me, and sure enough tested perfectly, so now the program uses the handle instead, and appears to have all features working flawlessly.