Performing an Internet Search

Prerequisite: Creating a Case Project

To find relevant information on the Internet the application allows you to search using the major Internet search engines and then use the search results for further research.

To perform an Internet search, do the following:

Double-click on one of the available search engines in the Search Tools view in the lower-left corner. For this example choose Microsoft's search engine Bing. The start page of such search engine will be opened in a new Browser editor window.

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Perform your search as usual using the online search engine. Then, the result links for such search will appear on the Browser editor window:

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Since you are using the normal web interface of the selected search engine, you can use all available options and refine your search to be as relevant as possible. As soon as you are satisfied with the shown results, you can proceed to the next step

Click on Web > Extract Search Result Links to extract the search results from the result page of the search engine and store them in your Case Project. The link extraction process starts and the system shows a warning that it will take control of the Browser editor in order to extract the links. They will be stored as bookmarks. If more than one case project exists, the system opens the Project Selection dialog to choose in which case project we want to store the search links (bookmarks). The software extracts ("scrapes") the search result links from the first and subsequent pages of the search engine. After it has extracted the maximum number of links (by default 100 links), it returns to the first result page. The progress of the scraping is shown in the Progress View. You can stop the link extraction process any time by clicking on the red cancel icon in the Progress View

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After the link extraction has finished, it creates a folder with Bookmarks files in the Bookmarks folder of the defined target Case Project. The extracted result links are stored as .obm files. A .obm file which we also call a “bookmark file” contains the actual result link plus meta information such as the search engine, the search query and a time stamp. Such meta information can be found by clicking on the bookmark file and then clicking on the Properties view.

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If several searches are carried out on the same Case Project, a sign (d) might appear on the left side of the Bookmarks folders. It means that there are some duplicate links inside that folder regarding all the links downloaded for the same Case Project. To discard them, click on Web > Delete Duplicate Bookmarks. See also: Delete duplicate bookmarks.

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Reviewing the bookmark files

In order to review the result links faster without opening a new browser window each time, you can select from the main menu Window > Reuse Browser . If this menu item is enabled the current browser editor view is reused and loads the link of the bookmark file with a simple click on the file in the Workspace Navigator view.

If you do a double-click on a bookmark file you can still force to open a new browser editor. If you want to delete irrelevant bookmark files, you can simply right-click the file and click Delete.

The system automatically detects bookmarks pointing to the same URL (so-called duplicates). These duplicates are marked with a (d) prefix in the Workspace Navigator view. For each duplicate bookmark there exists another bookmark pointing to the same URL but with an older time stamp. In order to delete all duplicates under a certain folder: right-click on the folder in the Workspace Navigator view and click Organize Bookmarks > Delete Duplicates. The duplicate detection is handy if you gather search results from multiple search engines and merge the results before you download the result pages to your case project.

See also: Using the duplicate bookmark detection and Delete duplicate bookmarks.