How do I make multiple queries on a search engine?

Question

Every day, I make the same 20 searches in Pub Med (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) to see if there are any new academic journals in my field. I was wondering if there is a way to automate this task. Is there a way to, say, open a chrome browser with 20 different tabs, each having the results of one search per tab?

Answer 1

You can easily do it from the configuration of your browser. But each time that yo open your browser you will open all the tabs.

1. Just open your searches in Firefox
2. Go to menu - options - general tab - use actual pages

The next times you open the browser all the tabs are opened.

Answer 2

I do this all the time. Make each of your queries and copy them from the url. Next copy each query and past it into notepad; all 20. Next add this code to each of them:

Create a batch file to open a URL:

Firefox

start firefox http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=computer+science --new-tab
start firefox http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=systems+admin+ --new-tab
... 20 times

Chrome:

start chrome http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=computer+science --new-tab

Then save your notepad file: Save-As, and name it jobquery.bat where .bat is the files type.

Then all you have to do is open the batch file to look those 20 queries each day.

Note: This is the easiest and most basic principle. You could get fancy and create a loop and read from a text file where each line will execute a new search based on a template with variables, but that would be a task for a person who loves to write code for the sake of writing code.