Standalone Search Software: Does it exist?

February 6, 2015 2:57 PM

I need software that will search multiple locations (University library, Google, WorldCat, etc.) using different queries of citations loaded from a text file. Does this exist?
posted by PHINC to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Can you explain what you want the output to be or what you're trying to accomplish?
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 8:49 PM on February 6, 2015

Response by poster: To try to find out which combinations of searches (Different queries and search engines) are most successful.
posted by PHINC at 9:15 AM on February 7, 2015

Best answer: May I suggest that you're looking for automated search software rather than standalone search software. That is, you want a software program that'll do some searches and compare the results. The program will either use an API (application programming interface) to each search service, or do "screen-scraping". There are probably softwares that are standalone that will accomplish what you seek, but they'll use these methods or similar.

Here are pages describing the APIs to WorldCat and Google. Two common screenscraping tools are Curl and wget, though most programming languages have their own libraries to retrieve stuff over the web.

Using a programming language, it'd take maybe 2 to 4 hours, and a couple of dozen lines of code to get you something usable.
posted by at at 7:22 AM on February 8, 2015