Upgrade StorageCreate item from current webpage feature in Zotero for Firefox
Hello,
I conducted a number of Google searches for a project and saved the search result pages via the "create item from webpage" feature in Firefox. I wanted to do all the searches in the same day so that my results were not affected by the day-to-day changes that can occur with Google results.
I saved each result page (i.e. Pg. 1, Pg. 2 of however many results pages there were) with the "crate item from current webpage" in my Zotero library and then went back to sort through them. For the pages that I saved first I was able to access the links that the Google results returned but for the pages that I saved later, none of the links work. I.e. I can see the Google results page, like Pg. 10 of 40 for the search that I did, but none of the links work anymore.
I am just wondering if I went about this incorrectly, i.e. the saved page would just be the search result page and not have access to any of the links. And if this is the case, how come the earlier ones worked (I did the searches over the course of two days, and the ones from the 2nd day are the ones with the broken links, I did not change any settings over the course of the two days). When I click on a link that no longer works the page that loads has this message "Attachment id is not an integer". If I select "view online" a webpage with working links loads but they are different from the ones in the snapshot version.
My goal here is to conduct the searches in the same time period and then analyze the results later because if I analyzed as I went, the searches would end up being done over a long period of time. If you have any recommendations as to how to do this, that would be great. Would I just have to take the extra time and conduct the search, click on each link and save those instead of the search result page? Bookmark in Firefox instead of Zotero?
Sorry about the long description! Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Vanja
I conducted a number of Google searches for a project and saved the search result pages via the "create item from webpage" feature in Firefox. I wanted to do all the searches in the same day so that my results were not affected by the day-to-day changes that can occur with Google results.
I saved each result page (i.e. Pg. 1, Pg. 2 of however many results pages there were) with the "crate item from current webpage" in my Zotero library and then went back to sort through them. For the pages that I saved first I was able to access the links that the Google results returned but for the pages that I saved later, none of the links work. I.e. I can see the Google results page, like Pg. 10 of 40 for the search that I did, but none of the links work anymore.
I am just wondering if I went about this incorrectly, i.e. the saved page would just be the search result page and not have access to any of the links. And if this is the case, how come the earlier ones worked (I did the searches over the course of two days, and the ones from the 2nd day are the ones with the broken links, I did not change any settings over the course of the two days). When I click on a link that no longer works the page that loads has this message "Attachment id is not an integer". If I select "view online" a webpage with working links loads but they are different from the ones in the snapshot version.
My goal here is to conduct the searches in the same time period and then analyze the results later because if I analyzed as I went, the searches would end up being done over a long period of time. If you have any recommendations as to how to do this, that would be great. Would I just have to take the extra time and conduct the search, click on each link and save those instead of the search result page? Bookmark in Firefox instead of Zotero?
Sorry about the long description! Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Vanja
In general though, besides being a one-click solution, you do not gain anything by using Zotero for this (I think). You can just as easily (and I think in this case bug-free) save the page you are viewing via the browser's Save As function (Ctrl + S on most browsers).
Vanja
you'll see that the links actually go through google - I don't actually know what they're doing, but I wouldn't bet on those links being stable.
There are specific tools that will allow you to download webpages with every link one level deep, depending on what you're doing, those might be better suited for your task then Zotero.
=== Technical details ===
The way Google results work is that they have proper links to search result pages, but the links also contain onmousedown events, which rewrite the href value with the URL that redirects through Google. So by the time the link is followed (essentially the onmouseup event), the URL changes and you're going through Google's servers. This way you can right-click copy links and get proper URLs, but clicking on them sends you through Google. The javascript that rewrites the links uses relative links, which is why this breaks.
=== End of technical details ===
There is nothing that we will be able to do about this.
Edit (fixed description above): so basically what adamsmith said. I just didn't catch it at the time. I was opening pages in new tab, so my links were being rewritten and I was seeing the relative URLs.