search web api

[mkborregaard]

Hi,

I'd like to make a workflow for the advanced search in google scholar. It works like a web-based API, ie your search creates a url like https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=all&as_epq=exact&as_oq=least&as_eq=without&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=author&as_publication=publ&as_ylo=1996&as_yhi=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5

 

How do I specify the keywords etc in my alfred (3)?

[dfay]

Unfortunately there's no real Google Scholar API (there are a few homemade attempts on GitHub but they rely on scraping the web page results and break easily) so there's no immediate way to get results in a form Alfred can parse and display.  

 

But if you just want to launch a search the basic custom search is just http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q={query}

 

In practice, the results are good enough that I use advanced search maybe once every six months (and I probably use Google Scholar at least a dozen times a day).

 

If you want to go for advanced search you'll need to parse the query string in a workflow -- see 

an example.