{"id":103,"date":"2018-01-28T21:58:22","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T03:58:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/?p=103"},"modified":"2018-01-28T22:47:13","modified_gmt":"2018-01-29T04:47:13","slug":"how-i-created-a-robot-researcher-with-zapier-evernote-and-duckduckgo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/2018\/01\/28\/how-i-created-a-robot-researcher-with-zapier-evernote-and-duckduckgo\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Created A Robot Researcher With Zapier, Evernote and DuckDuckGo"},"content":{"rendered":"

An idea I\u2019ve been noodling for quite some time (going back several years to my junior year at TCU<\/a>) is a tool that automatically researches topics in the background for you. One such tool existed for a brief period of time, Dunno<\/a>, but the company now appears defunct.<\/p>\n

Earlier today, I decided to take a stab at setting up a complex multi-step zap in Zapier<\/a> that would tie into Evernote<\/a> to pull the subject and post the result. I figured DuckDuckGo<\/a> would have some sort of API to access their instant answers and found that they do indeed<\/a>. Zapier’s Code action<\/a> allows you to run Python code, but doesn’t allow you to import additional libraries. To work around this, I found Mashape<\/a> (listed on DuckDuckGo’s API page) fully sufficient.<\/p>\n

The implementation details are below:<\/p>\n

#1: Create a trigger to watch for new notes in a specific Evernote notebook.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

#2: [Optional] Create a filter to only proceed with notes bearing a specific tag.<\/strong> You can skip this if you want the zap to run with any new note added to a certain notebook.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

#3: Create a code action to fetch the DuckDuckGo results as JSON. <\/strong>I used Python. Sample code below.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n

query = input_data[“note”].replace(” “,”+”)<\/p>\n

request_url = “https:\/\/duckduckgo-duckduckgo-zero-click-info.p.mashape.com\/?format=json&no_html=1&no_redirect=1&q=” + query + “&skip_disambig=1”<\/p>\n

response = requests.get(request_url,
\nheaders={
\n“X-Mashape-Key”: “YOUR_KEY”,
\n“Accept”: “application\/json”
\n}
\n)<\/p>\n

output = response.json()<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

#4: [Optional] Create a code action to compile a link to launch a DuckDuckGo search for your topic.<\/strong> I create this mostly for convenience; if I wanted to dig further into a topic, I could easily click the generated link. Sample code below.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n

query = input_data[“note”].replace(” “,”+”)compiled_link = “https:\/\/duckduckgo.com\/?q=” + query<\/p>\n

output = [{‘search_link’: compiled_link}]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

#5: Create an action to append the results to your note (or create a new note with the results).<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have a long list of topics I am idly interested in. I created this automated researcher to help feed those curiosities. If, after reading the results, the topic continues to pull on my mind I am free to devote my time to researching it deeper. If not, I can just file it away with the result included in case I ever want to look it up again.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m aiming to create a similar task using the Email Parser trigger<\/a> to let me email topics to my automated researcher and have it save its results to a new Evernote note.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An idea I\u2019ve been noodling for quite some time (going back several years to my junior year at TCU) is a tool that automatically researches topics in the background for you. One such tool existed for a brief period of time, Dunno, but the company now appears defunct. Earlier today, I decided to take a … Continue reading “How I Created A Robot Researcher With Zapier, Evernote and DuckDuckGo”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31,15,34],"tags":[40,37,36,38,6,39,35],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automation","category-code","category-zapier","tag-automation","tag-duckduckgo","tag-evernote","tag-notes","tag-python","tag-research","tag-zapier"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7tP59-1F","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111,"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/varunpramanik.com\/chronicles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}