A Useful ASP.Net Tool

Introduction
As some of you may know, I am a computer programmer. One of my hobbies is mugen, so I sometimes spend time trying to find new characters, stages, and such. I was thinking the other day about a bunch of characters I would love to find. Some of them are being developed right now by folks all over the world. I made playlist of videos these creators have created showing the characters that I am interested in. I put the playlist on my other blog: "Favorite Fiction". Every once a while I've been "googling" for these characters to see if they are complete or not. It got me thinking: "it sure would be nice if i had tool where I can take a list of my characters and search for them all with one click." I don't want to just put them all in a seach field but I want to run 10 searches for 10 characters and get 10 different result set. Unfortunately, I could find no such software. So I thought, I'd write one.

Features
So what I did make a program that is password protected (I can add users later on), and the user can then load up a comma-delineated text file containing all the items to look for search along with other key words that are to be applied to every search. Users can also decide which kinds of Google search engines they want to use: web, video, image, book, or patent. The list is then the fed to the Google search code and each search result is displayed in a separate browser window. The implementation I have on the Internet only works for Access because the server does not allow searches for the other files.

Future Enhancements
I'd like to make it smarter. Like maybe allow the user to have a list of sites that are excluded or a list of sites that must be in the results. The search criteria is generic. It can take any comma-delineated file. I would like to augment it so that it can take an Excel Spreadsheet or an Access database. Also I would like to do something more interesting, like actually open the best websites matching queries. I'd like to try to make a desktop version that does not run on a webserver. I also would like to give users a more options as to how to view their results.

Wanna try it?
Just go to the url where the site is: http://aspspider.net/mmcelhaney
I've put a sample csv file in Google documents: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pZNlMN4Sbndo-jY4cDpc0JA
You can e-mail me to get a sample Access database.

You can e-mail me to get the password and username to get into the application at mmcelha@aol.com and I can send you the information and answer any questions you may have.

Step-by-step Tutorial
1. Allow popups from www.aspspider.net
2. Download the sample Access database
3. Go to www.aspspider.net/mmcelhaney
4. Enter the username and password I will give you.









5. Click the Login button and you will see the following screen:












6. Select the kinds of searches you want to do. Enter the keywords for all the searches. Make sure you put a check into the "Use Local Paths" check boxes so that the application will use the path on the server. Select the checkbox by "Access".












7. Click the "Get Search List" Button













8. Hit the "Run Search Query" button and all the searches will be done and a window for each search will pop up with the results. Here is an example of search results.













Video Demo

The video demonstration is based on the program running in the Visual Studio dot Net 2005 environment so I did not click the program over to use Server paths. If you run it, it should be in Server Settings as I have stated in the above steps.





Disclaimers
This tool is not affiliated with Google, Electrobyte, or any Mugen creator.