How to expand search functionality in Airtable

Hmm! If you have a lot of automations to spare, you could:

1. Create a new table called Search or something
2. Create a new field in Content called “URL Match” or some such
3. Create an automation that triggers when a new record gets created in Search, and its action would be to find records in the Content table that match the URL in this newly created record, and then update the URL Match field

Your workflow would then be to go to your Sheet, grab the URLs, paste them into the Search table, creating one new record per URL, and the automation would look in the Content table for records matching each URL that was pasted in, does that make sense?

If you don’t have automations to spare, you’d probably need to make a scripting extension for this I think, and you’d just have a textbox and paste the URLs in, run the extension, and it’d automagically update the URL Match field on its own

You can also hire me to set up either option for you too if you don’t want to deal with it!

Hmm! If you have a lot of automations to spare, you could:

1. Create a new table called Search or something
2. Create a new field in Content called “URL Match” or some such
3. Create an automation that triggers when a new record gets created in Search, and its action would be to find records in the Content table that match the URL in this newly created record, and then update the URL Match field

Your workflow would then be to go to your Sheet, grab the URLs, paste them into the Search table, creating one new record per URL, and the automation would look in the Content table for records matching each URL that was pasted in, does that make sense?

If you don’t have automations to spare, you’d probably need to make a scripting extension for this I think, and you’d just have a textbox and paste the URLs in, run the extension, and it’d automagically update the URL Match field on its own

You can also hire me to set up either option for you too if you don’t want to deal with it!

Um, yes. But that really doesn’t advance the process since there are so many manual steps. I would approach it this way @Cara_Haynes -

1. Find a way to sync your GA list into an Airtable table.
2. Create a relational reference between your cards and the GA list; now you have all related GA URLs in your card view

Optionally, you may want to abstract the GA URLs list from the cards with an intermediate view so that you can manage the ebb and flow of the analytics results.

#1 can be done with Make, Zapier, or an Airtable-based script. Data Fetcher also has a pretty good solution for this.

Thank you for your response, Bill! Could you explain to me more what you mean by relational reference? I’m still relatively new to Airtable. Also, how would I abstract the GA URLs from the cards with an intermediate view and what exactly is an intermediate view? If it would be easier for you to explain this over video, I would very much appreciate it if you could make a Loom video explaining your process by showing me in Airtable, but I also understand if that would be too much work to replicate the same scenario.

Hmm! If you have a lot of automations to spare, you could:

1. Create a new table called Search or something
2. Create a new field in Content called “URL Match” or some such
3. Create an automation that triggers when a new record gets created in Search, and its action would be to find records in the Content table that match the URL in this newly created record, and then update the URL Match field

Your workflow would then be to go to your Sheet, grab the URLs, paste them into the Search table, creating one new record per URL, and the automation would look in the Content table for records matching each URL that was pasted in, does that make sense?

If you don’t have automations to spare, you’d probably need to make a scripting extension for this I think, and you’d just have a textbox and paste the URLs in, run the extension, and it’d automagically update the URL Match field on its own

You can also hire me to set up either option for you too if you don’t want to deal with it!

Hi, Adam!

I’m trying out your solution. I got the first part to work (setting up the trigger that finds records in the Content tab that match new records in the Search tab). But I’m stumped on how to get the Update Record action to only update the records that have been found. It doesn’t seem to be an option to choose in the Record ID field of the Update Record action. Could you help me see where I’m going wrong? Thank you so much!

Hi Cara, the Update Record action would update the original triggering record, specifically it would update its linked field to the Content table with the ID of the record it found in the Find Records action, does that make sense?

Hmm! If you have a lot of automations to spare, you could:

1. Create a new table called Search or something
2. Create a new field in Content called “URL Match” or some such
3. Create an automation that triggers when a new record gets created in Search, and its action would be to find records in the Content table that match the URL in this newly created record, and then update the URL Match field

Your workflow would then be to go to your Sheet, grab the URLs, paste them into the Search table, creating one new record per URL, and the automation would look in the Content table for records matching each URL that was pasted in, does that make sense?

If you don’t have automations to spare, you’d probably need to make a scripting extension for this I think, and you’d just have a textbox and paste the URLs in, run the extension, and it’d automagically update the URL Match field on its own

You can also hire me to set up either option for you too if you don’t want to deal with it!

Hi, Adam,

Maybe I’ve just done these in the wrong order, but I’m having trouble getting the Update action to use what was found in the Find Records action. I made a short Loom video showing the issue I’m running into.

Hi Cara, thanks for the loom!

Here’s what I would do if I were you:

1. Create a link between both tables
2. In the Update Record action, change the table to Search and in the Record ID section use the record ID of the record that triggered the automation
3. In the Fields section, choose the linked field between the two tables, and for its value, insert the list of record IDs found from the Find Records action

If you could invite me to a copy of your base that has dummy data in it I could set it up for you if you’d like

That might be the best option. I followed your steps, but it was creating new records in the Content tab rather than linking to the existing ones that were found in the first step. I’ve made a dummy copy of the base and removed all the proprietary data. Here’s a link to it: https://airtable.com/shreBOMqSwQs8fDYY

Let me know if you need me to share it with your email. Thank you so much for all your help on this!

Yeap got it, I’ve put the automation together in your base and it should be working as expected!