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SE Jay Scotto presents Action: Search Flow + Example. 6.5 mins. /

 

 

Search Actions in Copy.ai Workflows

The search action in Copy.ai workflows allows you to leverage the power of internet search within your workflows. With the search action, you can fetch data from the internet and then do something with those results in downstream workflow steps.

How the Search Action Works

The search action has several configurable parameters:

  • Number of pages - Specify how many pages or results to return

  • Search type - Search the entire web, images, products, etc.

  • Time period - Search over the past hour, day, week, month, etc.

Once configured, the search action will go out to the specified search engine, fetch the results based on your criteria, and return them to the workflow for downstream processing.

Extracting Data from Search Results

A common use case is to extract specific data from the search results. For example, you may want to extract the top URL or title from each result.

The workflow builder makes this easy - you simply specify what data you want to extract from the results, like the 1st URL, 2nd URL, etc. These extracted values can then be used in subsequent workflow steps.

Automating Research with Search Actions

One powerful way to use search actions is to automate research and content curation.

For example, you could configure a workflow to run a search every Monday for the latest news on "generative AI" from the past week. It would extract the top 3 results, scrape the article content, and summarize it into a newsletter.

This allows you to leverage Copy.ai workflows and the power of search to automate research on any topic on an ongoing basis.

Summary

The search action provides a simple way to integrate internet search directly into your Copy.ai workflows. With it, you can fetch search results, extract data from the results, and use that data in downstream workflow steps. This opens up many possibilities for automating research, content curation, and more.

The best way to master it is to try it out yourself on your own workflows! We welcome your comments below.

Hi, is it possible to limit the search function to a certain language or region when returning search results? Use case: i want to tweak the SEO content brief template to optimise for a specific European region.

Yes

Hi SophieSophie & Samuel - Thanks, Samuel for bumping this one up!  While we do not currently expose localization controls in our “Perform Internet Search” action today, you can leverage Google’s built in filter by prepending your search query with “site:.fr query]” to restrict your search results to French websites, for example.  This seems to work most of the time, but you may want to explore how accurate that is vs altering your regional settings directly in Google to the target location to understand what is the best approach.  Hope that helps!

Chris

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