i’ve checked out the web service, and i suppose it could be what would do the trick. what i want to do is slightly different from what you’ve had understood (my bad completely), so i figure i’d put it straight, in case there is another solution.

what i want to do is to use predefined search terms and search through specific websites (ie. the articles from certain websites which are fed through their respective rss-feeds) and return simply whether the search term was found in the articles or not. for example, let’s say i would like to know if the string ‘police’ is contained in any of the articles of, say, three different newspapers today. i figured i could list three rss-feeds from these websites, not search the feed description itself, but the actual articles which the feed links to, by picking up the links (to articles) in the feed and doing the search on these url’s. i would like to return simply how many occurrences the string has - ie. not simple string occurences, but how many articles the string occurs in (once or more).

like i said, i guess the web service module could do the trick, but there might be an even simpler solution? i don’t know how i’d write the java script for it, however - would it have to be done ‘manually,’ ie. a script that actually goes out and does the search itself, or do you know if there are solutions made already that could be called upon to do this?

again, thank you so much for your response and concern. hope to crack this problem wide open soon, and your help is greatly appreciated.

knut

If that’s what you are looking to do, as you suggest there’s no way to do this strictly within the bounds of pipes. But the good folks at Brickhouse have developed a web services module that sends out the rss from pipes to a url you specify which can do the searching you are looking for and then return rss/json back to pipes to finish it’s way.

Is that what you were looking to do? If not let me know and I’ll try and suggest something else. :)

thanks for quality posts! found your blog (and this entry) looking around for ways to tweak the yahoo! pipes… very specifically, i’m looking for a way to integrate string searches of entire pages (url’s, you know, normal pages) - not just RSS feeds. There is no functionality for this in the pipes themselves (as far as i can see - and i’ve looked real hard), but it seems to me to write some ajax might be the trick?

would you have any idea or comment on where i could even begin to work around this? what specifically i would like to do is to search for keywords in the respective articles that the RSS feed entries link to. that means gathering a rss feed, and probing each “link” url for a certain string, and returning simply whether the string was found or not.

not sure if im making myself v clear here tho… but since you obviously have a pretty good hang of it, i thought maybe you’d have some insights to share.

keep up the good work,
knut.
(email: theosloexperience [howdy!] gmail.com i’ll check back here tho, of course… )